


Gestalt Principle

by Ranowa



Category: Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Art, Atlantis Complex, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Suicide Attempt, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-03-17 02:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18956329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranowa/pseuds/Ranowa
Summary: "Do you think I came all this way back here for you just to watch you die?! Gods damn you to hell, Artemis Fowl, keep breathing, or am I going to pull your heart out and make it beat myself! HEAL!"





	1. The Hero

**Author's Note:**

> As promised! One more fic before I probably vanish back into FMA ether. (although I plan on seeing the movie, so hopefully that'll inspire more playing with this fun cast!) This is a little complicated so PLS READ AUTHOR'S NOTE.
> 
> An eternity ago, I wrote another Artemis Fowl fic, All in an Instant and Before (see my ffn if you want to read it), aka The Fic of Squandered Potential. It was still a worthwhile exercise and helped me learn a lot of things, but now when I think about it all I'm able to see is what could have been. One of those could-have-beens is Hecate Fowl: or, Orion was not the only alter that Artemis wound up with... and Hecate is who we might have had in canon if the series had been darker :) 
> 
> This three-shot here is a love letter to everything that that fic could've been, and especially to all the potential that Hecate had. It's set in some vague unwritten AU that's where I now envision that fic climaxing; obviously, since it's unwritten anywhere except my own head, I'm going to ensure that this is understandable without it. I'll also make it understandable without reading the original fic, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments! Additionally, if you're a psychology student, you already know the meaning of the title as well, but if not, don't worry; Artemis is going to give a brief lecture on it before the end :)
> 
> (If you want a quick summary of the set up, though: instead of building the Ice Cube, Atlantis Complex Arty got fucked over severely by Opal with a magical brainwash. He headed off on another time travel adventure on the run from the fairies, who Opal has spent months magically forcing him to believe are against him. Of course, team Goddammit Arty Not Again figures it out, and sends Holly after him to get him back. Time travel adventures and angst, woo!) 
> 
> And now, a love letter, to one of the best villains I've ever had:

_January 08, 1998, ?_

Artemis steepled his fingers before his face, elbows balanced on his knees and head bowed in deep, urgent contemplation. He closed his eyes once, his mind racing, and willed himself to calm.

A slight fidgeting from his right.

An obvious, irritatingly brazen cough from his left.

Artemis' jaw clenched.

They really didn't have the time for this, right now.

"Do you have something that you would like to contribute, Orion?"

From his left, again, there was a second cough, and then, a splutter. _"Contribute?"_ the infuriating boy said back; even through his shut eyes, Artemis heard the sharp scrape of his chair that indicated he had stood up. "Contribute?! Never mind what _I_ can contribute; why are we sitting here as if Hecate has anything worthwhile to lend to us at all?! Have you not been sitting here with me, Artemis, watching all that he's capable of? Has he not already tried to kill you, or have you forgotten so quickly?! Why, by gods, would you _trust him?!"_

Artemis left his eyes closed for another long moment, breathing in deeply through the frustration beating in his head. He inhaled once through his nose, then exhaled past clenched teeth.

Really, really, really _did not_ have the time for this.

"Because," he said, enunciating each syllable with an agonizing, creeping slowness. He slitted his eyes back open to look, first at the tense Orion, already on his feet, then to the silent and watchful Hecate, waiting with arms crossed and face inscrutable. Both, unsettling mirror images, but it was as if in one of those carnival houses Mother had dragged him to as a child; a distorted mirror to twist their reflection even further. Orion stood still on his left, a jester to the king's throne, a bold figure made of nothing more or less than righteous fury and borderline, crazed obsession akin to a preschooler and their favorite toy; Hecate on his right, a slithering advisor to his other ear that was a frigid block of cold, calculating madness.

And Artemis, left in between them. A king robbed of his scepter and his throne, left to give hollow orders and only to pray that his advisor and his jester would follow them. Hecate in his blue eye, and Orion, in his-

Artemis' mouth tightened, betrayal and a quick beat of paranoia constricting about his heart so close it took his breath away.

He couldn't think about Orion's fairy princess.

He couldn't let himself even begin to fall down that rabbit hole.

_Not now._

_Not when we're so close._

"We need Hecate, Orion. Because," he began anew, betrayal and terror still quaking around his heart. Even in his own head, he could feel the paranoid madness creeping up around him. "As we have been through before... there is no one else in this situation that we may trust. However, the three of us all have a vested interest in keeping my body alive and unharmed. The three of us are all we have to rely on, and if we have any hope of getting out of this situation, we are going to need _all_ of us. This includes Hecate, and if you are willing, Orion, it will also include you."

"I've given _my_ aid already," Orion spat, but his glare was not fixated on him. "If you would bite your tongue and your pride, and rely on our princess for help, then-"

"Your _princess_ is the reason we are in this situation to begin with, you daft and imbecilic-"

" _No one_ was speaking to _you,_ Hecate-"

"And nobody asked for _you-"_

 ** _"Children!"_** Artemis bellowed. _God._ A vein throbbed on in his virtual forehead and the shout tore in past his virtual throat and it felt as if he his virtual self was about to be split in two with the sheer insanity of it. He squeezed his eyes shut again, massaging at the bridge of his nose, then dropped a hand down to, instead, try to tug the virtual Orion back down to his virtual chair. "We are running out of time! Orion, even if I would contact Captain Short, I lack the ability to do so. We are on our own, here, and unless you possess the ability to construct a phone capable of accessing fairy networks out of scratch, I mean _alone."_

There was another tense silence. Orion stayed stubbornly on his feet, his arms folded and eyes narrowed back to the now silent all other alter. Nothing about his expression bespoke of trust, which was concerning, because Artemis truly was not sure if this plan could work _without_ each member of this group trusting the other implicitly and undoubtedly. Fire flickered in his mismatched eyes like an oil-soaked candle, but he kept his mouth shut, and that, Artemis suspected, was the best he was going to get.

And Hecate...

Artemis shut his eyes for a moment again, massaging his brow.

Hecate was silent, and not threatening to drown either of them over the edge of a boat. That was the most he could've asked for, from Hecate.

Some time ago, that fact alone would've been enough to stop this plan, then and there.

Now...

_Now, the fairies, conspiring against me. Foaly, spying on me. Holly, poisoning me. The entire underground plotting against me. Butler, my own Butler, even turned against me! But of course he was, after all that I've done, after all that I've lied, and hurt, and betrayed. My parents- even the twins? Have they been poisoned against me? If not on purpose, they're being used like it, get me to let my guard down; everyone is against me, everyone that I've ever hurt, and that's **everyone-**_

A bubble of abruptly crushing grief caught in his throat, and for a virtual breath, he was too overwhelmed to speak.

Then, he swallowed it back, and was left only with cold, calculating rationality.

They could not trust anyone.

They only had each other.

And, because it was too dangerous to ever rely on anyone but himself, because he was a thief and a thief had no friends to rely on in even in the ever-expanding black scope of the world, because he was _Artemis Fowl_ and not a good person-

They only had each other, and they only _needed_ each other.

"Our body is going to wake up shortly," he said, brusque and immediate. Kneading his hands together, Artemis stood, facing his two alters without so much as a wince and taking control, even within his own head. "When it does, we will only have the element of surprise for a brief moment. Orion: you must act swiftly, and irrecoverably."

The boy huffed, clearly still unhappy about it, but the urgency of their current situation seemed to have fought through even his one-track and moronic mind. Straightening his tie, glaring only at Artemis while sparring no look at all towards Hecate, Orion began to turn his back. " _I_ am- and have already proven myself to be!- a brave and unwavering knight, good sirs. Good sir and traitorous, yellow-bellied scoundrel. I should not think-"

 _"You_ have already challenged my father to a duel that would have ended with our skull crushed to a fine powder, Orion, so, for the last time, _listen to me!"_ With all but a snarl, because Artemis' patience had been ground down into a disintegrating dust some eight years back in his future and now there was _none_ left to bear, he hauled his alter back around, forcing their eyes to lock. "We are in the past! Every last action you take, no matter how minute, could have far-reaching and disastrous consequences into our future; _our_ present! You will follow the plan outlaid here and nothing more, because if you do not- _Orion-_ "

But, as he went on, Artemis increasingly realized that his words were juat of no use at all. Orion was staring at him now with a half-vacant, blank-eyed look as if he'd just sprouted a second head- or, perhaps, more accurately, split into three. It was just such an utterly _dumb_ look that Artemis was quite sure it had never been on his face before in his life, not _ever-_ D'Arvit he looked even more vacant than Beckett confronted with a quantum physics lecture.

And Artemis just moaned.

This had been a doomed venture right from the very start.

He was the only one here who had a full grasp of the situation, yes, but Orion was the only one with _no_ grasp on it _at all_. Hecate was solid ambition, through and through, so Hecate could at least grasp the simple principle _we are in the past- do not touch-_ but Orion had no such qualms.

Orion's only focus in the entire world was his bloody _princess._

_We are going to die in a blaze of nuclear fire because this idiot can't keep our disease-riddled head on straight._

From his right, again, was a slight, fidgeting little cough.

A second vein throbbed in his forehead.

"And, do _you_ have something that you would like to share, He-"

"Artemis," his alter interrupted, cold and slippery smooth as spun silk. "Please, if you would... allow me to put this into words that our _most courageous_ knight, here, can understand."

Orion flinched back away with a huffing snarl, fists curling and eyes blazing even hotter. "You-" he hissed, biting and sharp like an actual snake, and _by god_ , it really was starting to look like he was going to have to deal with a fist fight erupting in his own mind, by his own selves.

_Again!_

"I shall not listen to a single word this possessed sorcerer has to say, Arty-"

"Do _not_ call me that infernal nickname-"

Another roll of a rumble trembled underneath their feet, sending them all into silence. The lights flickered again, on and off, on and off, then with a little fizzing spark shut out entirely dousing their little antagonistic group into a puddle of liquid night.

The other two paled, Hecate still as ice, and Orion, even Orion, gone deathly quiet, and Artemis' heart lurched.

_We're out of time._

"Listen to me," Hecate ordered in the new darkness, a pale wraith with one cold hand suddenly latched around Artemis' wrist, the other to Orion's, tugging the both of them along towards their exit into the outside world. "There is a spell at work, here. I don't understand it, you don't understand it, but Artemis understands it, because he's the one who cast it. If you break the rules of that spell, then not only could we die, but your precious princess Holly dies, too. So if you have _any_ interest in getting out of this in one piece, I suggest you listen to the boorish, spineless twat currently giving the orders, and stick to the plan."

Orion yanked backwards with a wayward hiss of revulsion, shaking his hand as if he'd been burned. "And _what?"_ he snapped again, hand even darting out as if to shove him. "Because you've given us reason to trust _you?!"_

There was another unsettling rumble, underneath their feet. A thick, impenetrable silence settled, and slowly, finger by finger, the icy grip about Artemis' wrist dropped away.

" _You,"_ Hecate whispered. "You whining... unbearable... impetuous fucking _child..."_

Artemis knew, then and there, that if he did not intervene, he was going to watch Hecate try and cut Orion's throat the exact same way he had already tried to cut his.

Because while Orion might have been the personification of all that was good in him, that bloody dammed _spark of decency_ those fairies had set alight before they'd turned on him, then Hecate was the personification of everything dark. Hecate was manipulation and malice, through and through, his heart so black that he'd set the whole world on fire for a single gold coin, and Orion was bravery and justice and honesty and every last drop of good about him-

And, as it turned out?

Artemis Fowl just wasn't all that good a person.

 _And now,_ he thought wryly, observing with a pit in his stomach as Hecate advanced a tense step further and Orion's hand started to tighten into a fist of its own, _I require both the hero and the villain of my own story._

"Come," he snapped, voice itched out grating and hard in the murky darkness of his own mind. He did not move to touch either of them, did not dare move a single inch, but his eyes landed on Hecate's tense back and he held his hands out to wait. "We are now out of time. Either we move now, or we will lose the opportunity to do so at all."

There was another tense breath of silence. The three of them, hero, villain, and thief paralyzed in a deadly standoff trapped in his own mind while the clock ticked away, and with nothing to break the thick, poisonous silence but the pounding of his own virtual heart in his own virtual ears.

Then, Hecate turned himself back around as soundlessly as a snake, and with mismatched eyes that swam with nothing more, nothing less than sheer, disgusted _contempt,_ he placed his hand back in Artemis'.

"I still contend that it should be me," he muttered under his breath.

Artemis sighed. He knew what this was, and he would not be lulled into a false sense of security- and neither would Orion, by the looks of it. Still, when brave knight convinced he was about to set off to slay a dragon at last slid a reluctant hand into his, Artemis did allow himself one slight smirk, and said, "And if you knew Russian, like Orion, it might've been. So unless you think your Gaelic can get us home with an Irish ditty..."

There was a short, acerbic snarl from his right, and an even shorter, tenser laugh from his left. But Artemis Fowl had never been known for his jokes, so with that and that alone, Artemis squared his shoulders, and led the way back into the forefront of his own mind.

His back turned to the fractures that had cracked and split from his own mind, he did not see either the tense suspicion, glimmering in Orion's eyes- or the black glare that swept across Hecate's visage, the very moment he'd turned away.

 _More is coming,_ that glare said.

* * *

_Somewhere in Russia_

Orion eased back into his body with the aches and pains of a man who'd just tumbled down a sheer cliffside to dash against the rocks below.

Or, perhaps, more succinctly:

 _"Bloody **hellfire,"**_ he gasped, and collapsed.

His leg was still injured, and badly, at that. He could feel the sting and slow soak of wet blood through his pants, and did not have to even think of touching it to see the damage for himself.

He and Hecate had watched Artemis get the wound, days ago, now- an artifact of his ill-gotten sorcery and an increasingly painful one, at that. It already hurt a stretch and and leagues more than it had last time Orion had been in control, and worse than that, the rest of him hurt now, too. Bruises and swollen cuts ached all the way through him, a singing chorus of hell, but he _had to move,_ so he just _did._ He had to fight his way back upright, out of this dungeons, and back across the ends of the earth to his fair maiden, but to do that, first, he had to get to his feet.

So, he did.

The singing chorus screeched into a bloodcurdling opera the second he'd worked his way even up to his knees, but he did it. With all the dizzying strength needed to scale a mountain, he reeled his way back onto his swaying knees, and then, scrabbled his way back up to his unsteady feet.

The room tilted twice, and for a heartbeat he nearly ended up crashed back down on his face like an undignified wretch.

Quite possibly _would have,_ in fact... if not for the whispering he could already feel, even now, niggling at the back of his mind.

Artemis and Hecate were watching.

If he wanted to keep Hecate back and out of the way, then he had no choice but to carry through with _the plan._

As ridiculous and impossible as Orion was still convinced it was.

First to attend to were the trio of brutish, drooling thugs left drooling all over themselves in the corner. Artemis had explained, time and time again, that they were the Russians. Now, Orion did not rightly know who or what a Russian was.

What he did know was that the biggest of the lot was already stirring, and while he knew he could hold his own against just the one, all three was another matter altogether.

 _Wouldn't have been if Artemis had consented to getting me a sword,_ he thought grumpily, _but, alas..._

_"Orion? Orion, can you hear me?"_

Orion stiffened, his tongue curling. Even now, he couldn't be free of them, was that it? It was not loud, little more than a fuzzy whisper at the very back of his mind, like a call back through a waterfall or a thick, warm blanket, but he could hear it, all the same. Honestly...

"Yes, Artemis," he murmured aloud, kneeling before the still stirring, moaning thug on the floor. He poked his filthy cheek, then had to swallow a little giggle when the poke made him twitch like a moth with its wings pinned. "Are you quite sure you don't wish for me to vanquish them like vermin? There's still time- and a criminal deserves nothing less-"

 _"Just the mesmer, if you please,"_ Artemis groaned, sounding increasingly vexed, and Orion had to resist the urge to grin. _"You should have enough magic left..."_

The reminder made Orion scowl, an errant soreness in his back twitching. Ah, yes... this _sorcery_. On one hand, it was the same brand of magic employed by his fair maiden- therefore, it simply had to be good and just. There could be no other quality to something possessed by his beautiful Holly.

Except, Artemis had not received this magic from Holly, or, in fact, properly received it to begin with. Orion and Hecate had both been imprisoned, forced to watch when the thief had stolen it away from a demon sorcerer, sucking up every last spark like a toxic beast inhaling a meal to leave behind little more than a desperate husk.

 _That_ was not his Holly's magic.

Orion closed his eyes briefly, shivering through the continued pulse of impatience in his head, and bit his tongue to silence the protests for another time.

After all, Artemis had been right about one thing- they were _really_ running out of time, here.

With a deep breath, a crack of his knuckles, and, most importantly, a big, charming smile, Orion got back down onto his knees, faced the fuzzily blinking man head on, and said, "Hello!"

_"Russian, you blithering idiot! The whole point of sending you instead of Hecate was so you could SPEAK RUSSIAN! ORION! HEY, **ORION!"**_

Oh- _most right. Of course. D'Arvit. Russian._

Then, _what's a D'Arvit?_

Coughing, Orion started again underneath Artemis' whining like a stuck pig in his head. He blinked on down at the man through the warm and blue haze of sparks that Artemis had never used, and Hecate had refused to touch, but that Orion took to as a naturally as a sun did to a summer day, and then he breathed, warm and filling and he could _taste_ the magic, he could taste the glow of life that meant _fairy,_ and- _"Privyet..."_

Orion, again, did not know just what Russian was, or how exactly he knew what to say. It had just been a part of him ever since he'd split off from Artemis, an immutable, inherent part of him just as deeply as his own name and his need for his princess Holly. But he knew Russian, and Hecate didn't, and that was the only reason why he'd been allowed out to control their body.

He couldn't squander it.

In short order, Orion had all three of the staggering Russians dazed, on their feet, and under his spell. Artemis was terrified of the mesmer; it had consumed so much of his thoughts, the scholar deathly frightened of just what it was capable of doing to him, so even without ever having used it before Orion knew what to do and had the brutes under his control, simple as that. One by one, the Russians were gotten upright, and one by one, he ordered them to leave the building, and not come back inside no matter the cost.

Soon, there wouldn't be a building for them to return to.

 _"Yes..."_ Excitement stirred in the back of his head, a faint thrum that warmed in his veins and lightened in his heart. _"Yes- very good, Orion-"_

"Hey, Arty?"

There was an indignant splutter, barely heard like a whisper from underneath his entire world, and Orion smirked. "Let's leave this to the experts," he said, and at last took his first limping, shuffling steps out of the room.

Artemis huffed.

The enemy's lair that he had found himself in a filthy, disgusting hovel, a dark dungeon even past the deep room he had been left in and in which Artemis had poisoned their attackers into a daze. The wet and the cold encroached around him as he crept on, the gentle spark of magic always flickering just under the surface, like a little candle flame to be protected by the hand from the despair and cruelty outside.

This might've been intended to become his prison, but now, even streaked with blood and bruises and hurt almost from head to toe, broken free from his cell and free with all the magic and power in the world-

Now, he was going to be its king.

There was another whisper in the back of his mind, this one not quite words but more of a feeling, instead, guiding him through the twisted halls towards the heart of this dark and horrible dungeon. Artemis trying to tell him where to go, Hecate trying to command his hands once he got there. Hecate... always, dammed _Hecate..._

His mouth tightened again, sparks buzzing on his hands, and Orion stalked on again down the stale, dripping hall. Artemis was one thing. A boorish and emotionally stunted madman that heard voices in his head, possessed by crazed demons so thoroughly he no longer knew up from down, left from right.

He meant well, though.

As unhelpful and stubborn and misguided as he was, Orion still believed that he meant well- even if he _was_ simply disastrous at showing it.

Hecate...

Distrust squirmed in his stomach like a nest of worms, and unease flooded him.

Artemis was a fool to trust Hecate. Perhaps, understandably so; Artemis did not know Hecate, not well, had not met either of them beyond just these past several days. But enough had happened in these days alone for Orion to know that the only trust there was to be had between them was between him and Artemis, and that trust was to keep Hecate locked away as securely as Prometheus was bound to his rock.

There was _no good_ to come from him, and Artemis was a dammed, bloody fool to not realize it for himself.

The enemy's lair was small enough, or perhaps just felt that way, after the mental map Artemis had already constructed. There weren't many left for Orion to run into and every one that he did, it took only the faintest suggestion with the mesmer to send them on their way. Weak-willed, the lot of them... nothing more than weak-willed servants to send to their knees in instant and deserved subservience. There was no on there to fight him- there was no one there to even challenge him.

Oh, Holly was going to be so _proud_ of him...!

_"...rion...? Come in, Orion... ...hear me...?"_

_Yes. I'm getting a stronger hold, yes, thank you, gods, thank you, Holly-_

Soon, Artemis and Hecate wouldn't be able to touch him.

"Yes, Arty," he whispered, just for the irritation he knew it would cause. "I know where I'm going- I see it, right there! The heart of the castle!"

There was another faint grumble in his head, the words indecipherable again, but this time he could imagine Artemis and Hecate both shouting at him, and it was enough to make him smile. He told nothing but the truth. His destination awaited now just at the very end of the hallway that reeked of blood and death- the destination of Artemis' famed and special _plan._

Or, in so many other words: return to the server room and network center, and by fire and by magic, take them out.

Whatever... any of that meant.

Orion crept along, magic tingling again in his fingertips as he drew ever closer, now sticking close to the slick wall with his eyes and ears open. The door ahead was ajar, just a little, once guarded but after he'd already mesmerized his way through the hideout, it was already deserted. But this was the the deepest treasure pit of the enemy's castle, and if there was any great beast on this quest for him to slay, it would be just up ahead.

He crept ahead further, steps light over the ice-cold concrete at his feet. Carefully, so, so _carefully_ , he pressed himself close to the wall, tight against the stone and back slicking down with the wet mold. There it was, now, just a step closer...

"... considered contacting the Irish authorities?"

'What? Just- calling the police?" There was a short, brutal cough of a laugh. "Are you insane, Alexander?"

_Gods be dammed._

_Not alone._

Artemis was talking again, barking orders and flailing about; Orion ignored him, still pressing himself close to the slick wall to listen in. Artemis had proven himself no more effectual than a lump of wet clay, this entire cursed venture. If _Artemis_ had been able to solve this, then it would be Artemis here, right now, fighting past this army of villains to return to their princess' side.

It wasn't Artemis here, and it most certainly was not that demon Hecate.

It was his turn to fight.

"...all I mean to say, is, we were told to find out everything we could about this man and take care of him if we could, and- well! Here we have it! Guy committing murder right on tape!"

"And you want to just report him to the Irish cops?"

"Well... why _not?"_

Orion's eyes narrowed, suspicion crawling deeper down his back to shudder all the way down to his spine. Most troublesome... and Irish? Was not Artemis from the kingdom of Ireland?

_This might be something that requires attention..._

"-and how did we even get this footage, anyway?"

The other Russian sighed heavily; then there was some faint clicks, like nails against wood or fingers against plastic. "We had surveillance on Fowl Manor. When this bloke left, we tailed him to be safe... ended up witnessing a murder. No idea who the guy is or- well, bloody hell, man. Pretty sure if we don't take him out, he'll get himself arrested soon, anyway."

_Fowl Manor..._

Yes, he believed that he had heard quite enough.

Magic buzzed as a swarm of flies in his skull, a burning heat in his eyes and with no further impetus than that, Orion shoved off the wall and strode straight into the room. The doors banged open with a metallic, shuddering _clank_ that echoed and sung, and there was instant panic and alarm- but it was already too late to matter.

He had his enemies under his spell from the very instant they'd turned around.

 _"Good evening,"_ Orion intoned, smiling glib through flawless Russian, and even further flawless magic. _"Good evening to you, and good evening to you, my good sirs."_

The first thug, a burly, muscly troll of a man with too many scars and not enough hair, blinked once. The second thug, a leaner, taller beanpole with too much hair that hid all of the scars, blinked twice.

Orion beamed.

_"Thank you kindly for your hospitality. Now, may I advise that you join the rest of your unsavory, disgraceful cohorts outside?"_

The pair blinked again.

Orion continued to beam.

Then, with little more than a collection of dazed murmurs, the pair of them turned together, and filed silently right back out the room.

_By the stars, magic is AWESOME!_

There was a collective exhalation of relief within him, half of it in his mind, half of it Artemis' domineering effect over his own body. _"Job bloody well done, Orion,"_ he heard, _"bloody well done!"_ and then there was a ghost of urgency guiding his hands, a need that wasn't his own trying to move his feet to get him to act.

Orion, however, was not quite ready for that just yet.

The room he'd found himself in was most certainly a strange one. Glowing, eerie lights, glowing, eerie screens; a pale, otherworldly blue luminescence not unlike the magic that lived in his soul. It shone throughout the murky darkness like Lord Sol upon Lady Luna, the technology that Artemis clung to so desperately and that Orion did not understand in the slightest-

But even if he did not understand it, perhaps, for Artemis' sake, he could operate it.

"My friends," he intoned, spreading his arms wide and his smile at large. The bright glow of the screen seared into his eyes, a blinding spotlight into- ah, yes! There it was! The light of his own past. "My good scholar Artemis- my woeful traitor of a demon, _Hecate._ You're listening, are you not? I know you are; I can hear you, and you can hear me."

There was another whisper in his mind again, uncertain and unsure, and, he could feel it, now, impatience. They both wanted him to shut his mouth and move on, instead, as little more than an obedient child. And Lord, was there no time for Artemis' impatience, or Hecate's treachery.

He was not a murderer like Hecate, and he was not a plotter like Artemis-

But he was no child.

"You see here before us, Artemis! I tried to explain to you, so direly, why our treacherous reflection was not to be trusted, so many times, and yet you would not listen- you would trust _even him,_ over our precious Princess Holly!" He shook his head in disgust, spitting down onto the keys underneath his hands. The foolish, wretched boy... "The stars in the sky have fallen for her night and day, none so brilliantly and faithfully as I do for our beloved, while Hecate has dithered his time about with treachery and machinations of betrayal- the choice is so simply, there's not even a choice to be had at all! Yet, you somehow still manage to have made the wrong one?!" He gave another sick, disparaging shake, so disgusted and beside himself there were not even words.

Blessed be his luck, though, it seemed that words were not going to be necessary.

If what he'd overheard from the Russians was correct, then what he'd found here now was all that he was going to need.

"So," Orion said, steady, still, over the complaints and whining and shouting in his head. Distant and muffled, like cries past a blanket, and barely even audible at all under the brilliance of the princess that he still sought, even now. "Artemis- I shall now give you something that even your desperately small, scholarly mind can handle."

Then, with all the precious and skill of a knight on the battlefield, he reached forwards to the mouse that he only recognized because of Artemis, and he pressed play.

Before him, on the glowing screen, was a video. It was a scene that Orion recognized, starring a figure that he recognized, too- not himself, but his body. Standing port side a blustery ferry over an equally blustery sea, his coat billowing in the wind and his hair tossing about like flotsam at sea. The whole of him sick, the whole of him unwell, while the spirit in his mind was sicker than anything there was in his body.

It was Hecate.

Artemis had not been well, when this had happened. Orion remembered it to every exact detail; it had been Artemis' first period of illness, the first time the scholar had entered his own mindspace to allow one of them to break free, but he'd been dazed through this entire encounter on the boat. He had not been conscious enough to observe, and when he had gathered his wits back about himself, it had been too late for him to see it.

Artemis had not believed him, then, about Hecate.

He would be _forced_ to believe him now.

As Orion watched, the devil in his own skin turned back about on the boat. He stood still balanced delicately against the railing, but now, even from this pathetic sanctuary's vantage point, they could all see his bicolored eyes flashing, darting about the whole deck for the target for his bloody desires.

And there, sure enough, she was.

The young, redheaded child, just a little girl, reluctant and frozen back in the burgeoning snow. His blood chilled, icing down like the flood of a wintery waterfall that tightened in his stomach and swam in his veins, but still, no matter what, he kept his eyes on the screen. He did not want to watch it again. He desperately did not want to stand here again and see the assault and murder by that cowardly, black-hearted scum that he had failed to stop.

But for Artemis to see, then Orion, once again, had to see.

The brutish thugs that had, evidently, been spying on Hecate were not close enough for any of the words between the pair to be overheard, nor for the worst of the Hecate's crimes to be seen in his eyes. But he stood there at the bow of the ship all the same, the wind tossing through his hair and guiding the child forward into his deadly arms. She crept close again, as hunter might tip toe to a wild and bleeding animal; for the second time, Orion had seen this, now, oh, ye gods, the second time-

And Artemis was- what? Lord; the boy was shouting, he could hear it in his mind. Artemis did _not_ like this, no, sir, he did not. Whatever words he was howling were silenced through the gradual control Orion had eked out, but he was howling, all right, and Orion could only narrow his eyes and latch his hands tighter about the desk, forcing Artemis to watch. If he wanted to trust Hecate, then he was going to have to see just what Hecate was capable of.

Hecate and the poor, innocent child spoke on. Words exchanged, stolen away by the wind; gesturing and madness, smothered just underneath the cold of winter. The child, frightened, Hecate, sublime- and Artemis, panicking away in his head. _Good,_ Orion thought savagely, advancing ever closer. _See him, Artemis. See what the devil in our skin has done._

_See what you submit to and accept, if you are really so very insistent, on bowing down to Hecate._

When the devil swept down to haul the child up into the air by her wrist alone, still, even Orion shuddered.

Artemis, in the very back of his head, screamed.

A twinge of sympathy whispered in his heart, a sorrow and regret that weighed him down as solid iron shackles. He understood, he really, really did. It'd been unbearable for him to watch it the first time alone, and as spineless and unheroic as Artemis was, he knew even he did not want to violently attack the innocent. But that was the whole _point_ of the matter!

Artemis had to see what Hecate was capable of to know how imperative it was to keep that demon locked up tight in the back of their own head.

Yet Artemis screamed on, and Hecate, even now, held the poor child out over the water. Artemis was horrified in his head, he could feel it without words; Artemis was upset and angry, Artemis wanted this to stop. _Artemis_ was such a dammed coward it was infuriating; Artemis could not bear to watch a recording of what had already been done- the implications of his own actions!

Orion tensed again, agony and shock and all kinds of horror sweeping through him like a cloud.

Artemis _and_ Hecate were going to do nothing but hold him back, and drive their body to destruction. Hecate, through his own traitorous malice, and Artemis, through his sickening inaction.

The screaming in the back of his head grew louder. Over and over, the same thing, the same- it was a name, yes, a name... the _same_ name, over and over. A chanting chorus underneath the chords of his soul, a harmony that echoed into a scream and Hecate was there; Hecate, still, always there, holding the little girl out over the coursing current of the channel. There was magic, now; he could see it, the blue sparks buzzing over hands and eyes and the air itself, magic just like his, magic just like...

Just like his... princess'...

Orion's heart went cold.

_Just like Princess Holly._

There, Hecate stood, dangling that flailing, shaking child over the water. There, that magic was, Artemis' magic, Holly's magic, but there was a world of fairies and a world of magic below. And there, in the back of his head, Artemis was screaming, louder, louder, _louder-_

_"HOLLY! HOLLY! THAT'S HOLLY SHORT!"_

Orion froze.

Realization smacked him in the same nauseating heartbeat as Artemis' horror broke straight through, and doused him through from head to toe.

_**"HOLLYYYYYY!"** _

And, there on the screen, Hecate loosed his hand, and Holly Short fell to the coursing, ice-cold sea as limply as a stone into a pond.

Artist: [Akarri](https://www.fanfiction.net/u/5419659/Akarri)


	2. The Villain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos/comments! One more chapter, which needs proofreading just like this one did, so should be up in a couple days ;u;
> 
> As always, I'll answer any questions in the comments!

Artemis sat, blank-minded and still, and stared.

His mind-office around him blurred and tilted down on its side, a sickening spiral over the pounding in his head. Across from him, the screen that showed Orion's world had spun, too; now he sat on the filthy ground, fallen on numb legs to collapse down onto hands and knees, and trembling so hard he could barely see.

Orion hadn't known, some very, very distant, dizzy part of his head realized, _Orion didn't know it was her,_ but it was too late, now, to matter.

It was too late for anything to matter at all.

_Holly._

That was her. Dangled right out over the Irish Sea in the very dead of winter, and then _dropped_ straight into the waters below. _He_ had done that, it was inescapable, unavoidable, undeniable; he had picked up his closest friend and tossed her out like a sack of potatoes to drop _-_ and she'd fallen- she'd _dropped-_

Artemis gasped. Nausea lurched upwards in his throat and he tasted bile, hot and noxious and he almost threw up even past clenched teeth. No... no, that couldn't be... that wasn't right, it- _no-_ he sunk his head into his hands, desperate fingers clutching at his hair to tug and rip so violently there was blood.

It had been the dead of winter, and right on the encroaching heels of a snowstorm. They'd been out over in the dead depths of the Irish Sea, the shores too far away for anyone but a fish to swim to, no other boats in sight, and with assuredly no backup coming for her. Fairies were weak to the cold, and probably even weaker to being cold and soaked. Even with magic, even with Foaly's tech, she was too small and too weak.. She could not have swam, and she could not have endured.

She had frozen to death and drowned.

_Holly's gone._

_**(And you killed her.)** _

His entire world rocked so badly it felt like he, too, had dropped a twenty foot free fall to crash into the roiling seas below.

"That- that was _Holly?_ Fairy elven Captain Holly Short?"

The sickening spinning wrenched to a grinding halt.

"No- noooo..." There was another short, wicked laugh, high-pitched and nearing hysterical. "This is- I knew it was a fairy, and I certainly had my suspicions, but this? _This?_ This- oh, Artemis- beyond my _wildest dreams-"_

The trembling words then tumbled off into another cracking, disbelieving laugh. The steps behind him continued to pace, and the laughter continued to rise.

An ice-cold claw clenched about Artemis' heart, and sank it down into the pit of his stomach like a stone.

Slowly, unbearably, agonizingly slowly, Artemis swiveled around.

Hecate paced behind him, eyes sing-song wild and smile so huge it had collapsed into madness. He turned another step, hand dragged through his hair so violently it spun it into windswept chaos, and then, with another gasp of disbelief, he spun about to face him, instead. "I did it!" he gasped; his hands jumped up skywards. " _I killed Holly Short!"_

Standing there, arms outstretched and smile beaming wide right there in their own mindspace, Hecate did not look happy.

He looked _unhinged._

Madness in his blue eye- and chaos in his gold one.

Holly's- Holly's _eye..._

Artemis' stomach lurched violently again, and it in less than even the tiniest fraction of a second, his own hand had sprang up, unbidden, to cover his own left eye.

_No, no, no, no, no..._

Mid joyous spin, Hecate caught his eye, his human eye, his human eye with his stolen, thieved, _murdered_ fairy one, and his smile spun from ecstatic to delirious. "Oh, _what is it now,_ Artemis? What ever is it _now?"_ He flung his arms out again and ducked forward almost like a swaying drunk, his waving arm reached out to carelessly cup his wrist in his own hand.

Artemis flinched back so badly he nearly cracked his skull on his desk corner.

"Well? _Well?_ What is the matter _now,_ Artemis?!" His mirror image all but pouted, a childish and pathetic whine in the wake of no one's admiration or adoration but his own. "Didn't you see what Orion showed us? I killed Holly Short! She found us, and _I_ stopped her! Isn't that what you wanted?"

"W- _wanted?"_ Artemis reeled back as if he had been struck. The words felt like Butler had just struck him in the stomach and he could barely even see, his head whirling and his heart racing so fast he could feel the blood pound in his ears. "How could you think- I- you monstrous, sniveling- _wanted? WANTED?!"_

Every last fiber of his being rebelled against it. It was as natural as thinking, as natural as breathing- Holly Short was a literal part of him. He could no more want her gone than he could kill Butler.

_(But she's already gone._

_You killed her.)_

Hecate stared back at him, all but gobsmacked. Still panting, still beaming, but abruptly slack-jawed, now, his brow creased down in blank consternation. "What's wrong with you?" he pressed, reaching forwards to his own desperately clamped, shaking hand. "You're the one who ran all the way here to get away from her- _you_ couldn't even face her! She hurt us, Artemis; the whole of those accursed fairies have been poisoning us for months!"

"I- I know that! I know, Hecate, of course, but-"

"Then but _what,_ Artemis?! What is your _problem?!"_ Hecate abruptly paced away, turning to all but tear his hair out wild; Artemis could feel his heart pound as acutely as he could feel his own. "The fairies were tearing us apart... they've nearly killed us before, they never forgave you for what you'd done and they were going to _end us,_ this time. You know it's true!" he cried, and his voice was half-desperate, now, shuddering straight through with dumb shock. "You know they would've killed us if we hadn't escaped, you had to run eight years away just to survive it- and what are you even doing here, then, Artemis?! You've done all of this, planned and fought for so long... all I did was _exactly_ what you wanted! I killed her, and what was your plan, here, going to accomplish?! You wanted her gone! You ran away from her, you wanted her-"

_"I wanted her gone, not DEAD!"_

"Gone?!" Hecate shouted back, his eye, _Holly's_ eye, struck wide. " _Gone?!_ What is that?! What kind of deflection is that?! Say the word, Artemis, admit it out loud; admit you wanted her _dead,_ you-"

 _"No!"_ He lurched backwards and hit his mindscape's wall, smacking against it and when Hecate reached for him, jerking back again. Wanted her _dead?_ How could Hecate have split from his own mind yet still come out so baselessly _misinformed,_ so- so _stupid?!_ He felt sick and wrong, Holly's eyes still hidden behind a trembling hand and the other desperately raising to clutch his head in his hair. "No, I _didn't!_ I ran away from her, from _them,_ and I came back here to stop them, but- but I wasn't going to kill her, Hecate! That was _never_ the plan! Holly's- s-she's my _friend,_ she- I know she is- she- she-"

She was, wasn't she? Wasn't she?! Holly was his _friend..._ had been, upon a time, he'd trusted her, once upon a time; no matter what had happened between them now there had at least once been a time when he had trusted her and she had cared about him. Never trusted him, never forgiven him, but the friendship had been real. She'd- he'd watched her bleed out in Hybras _calling his name_ , of course she'd cared, of course-

_Never forgave you, never trusted you, against you, against you_

"S-she..."

"She was making us _sick,_ Artemis! She poisoned us; turned Butler against you! He sold you out to _them!"_

"Holly- no... no, no-" He moaned, teeth chattering against his hand and heart so heavy he sunk. No, no, no- but of course it made sense, after all he'd lied and plotted against them, of course they'd have lied and plotted back... a thief had no friends, after all, and he was a thief, and yet she had pretended to be his friend after all, all this time- but _this-_ "Even if it's all true, she still didn't-"

"She _what?!"_ With the stalking anger of a wild animal, Hecate jerked closer still, one hand raised as if to backhand him and the other fisting by his side. "She betrayed us! She'd hunted us down on that boat and if I hadn't drowned her, _she_ would've drowned _us!"_

"You don't know that!" The words came out half a frantic sob, half a desperate scream, and suddenly Artemis found himself on his feet, too, head whipping back and forth in an ever increasing panic. "You have no idea- Holly was my friend, she wouldn't have done that to me, I know it-"

And then, as soon as he was on his feet, Hecate was back on him.

His alter collided with him with all the force of a solid tackle by Butler, a knee to the chest winding him solid and two hands locking about his wrist tighter than metal restraints. Hecate shoved him back down into his desk chair then was on top of him straight after, pinned down and trapped back and face right in his-

And Hecate's hand, shoved right through the buttons on his shirt to grasp the heavy weight of a single gold coin, bound hanging about his neck as a leash and a noose.

"She's your _friend?"_ Hecate snarled, tugging so hard it choked the breath out of him. "You sentimental, sniveling child. You pathetic waste of space, she is not your friend. You know it's not real, that people like _us_ do not have friends, but you're addicted to that dream, anyway! You need it like you need to breathe- you need it so badly you can't even imagine yourself without it!"

The proof gleamed right there in Hecate's pale, white-knuckled fist of a hand.

There, yanked up in between the two of them, was his charm. His so-called spark of decency, gifted by none other than Holly herself, and chained faithfully around his neck for all the years since.

He'd taken it off some time ago, now. Back in his own time, at the height of compulsions and fear, a terror clutching at his heart when it'd hit him that that coin was _**Holly's**_ and she was spying on him through it, Foaly was watching him, Butler was poisoning him, and... and he'd found nothing, but- that was no proof; absence of evidence was not evidence of absence-

But that was all no matter, because he'd left it in his own time. It would've been dangerous, to go through the time tunnel with such a useless charm, and moreover, he'd had to drop it. He had had to let it go and cut that last connection, because he'd known he could not anchor himself to the people that had _betrayed_ him any longer.

That gold coin was currently sitting, abandoned under a sheaf of papers, left on his desk eight years into the future.

There was no spark of decency, hanging round his body's neck.

But here, in his own mind... here, where his body was not _real_ at all, but a mere visualization of what he saw himself as...

It had followed him here.

It hung, even now, around his neck- and across from him, he could see, that it did _not_ hang around Hecate's.

The spark of decency, handed to him by his closest friend in the world.

And he'd killed her.

His world tilted on a shattered axis, and something very important in him disintegrated right then and there, and he knew that there was no getting it back.

_I gave so much, fought for so long, ran so hard to escape... to get away... to make Holly be **gone...**_

_This is not what I wanted._

Distantly, distant as a mountain summit or the dark side of the moon, he felt Hecate toss him back with the disgust of a child trashing a broken toy. The coin spun and thumped against his chest, every last bit of warmth ebbed away by the ice in his heart, and he watched it sway in the new, disgusting silence of his own mind, as every last bit of foundation he'd still had crumbled away.

Then, just as distant, he again heard Hecate.

_**"What is he doing?! ORION!"** _

Artemis' head continued to spin. At first, he could not even find the will in him to move at all.

But as Hecate's fists continued to pound against the desk, and his shouts continued to split his ears, and his heart continued to break, slowly, somehow, Artemis tilted himself back around, and followed Hecate's gaze back towards the outside world.

The master screen had clouded with black smoke and glowed with burnished gold. The heat of a wild blaze burned through his whole world, flames flickering wild and smoke spiraling higher.

And, best they could tell, Orion sat limp in the middle of it all, slumped back against the wall- and his pale, bruised arm held out before him for all three to see.

He'd cut his own wrist.

For the second time in as many minutes, his head spun.

_"-Orion! Orion, you bloody fool, stop it! You're going to kill us! ORION! Artemis-"_

"...Ah," Artemis said drearily, a numb, dazed sort of shock chilling him from head to toe. "So he carried through with the plan after all."

Hecate, still, carried on with his fit; flailing fists, wild hair and eyes, pacing about like a caged cat. "Carried through- _Artemis!"_ he spat, and was on him again, shocked and terrified for the very first time he'd ever seen in him. "The plan was to torch the place, not _torch ourselves!_ He's going to kill us- get up, _get up!_ We've got to stop him! _Come on, Artemis!"_

But Artemis did not want to _come on._ Artemis, his numb feet dragging underneath him and his even number arms all but pinwheeling about, did not want to be pulled on towards the door. He did not want to fight back into control of his own body, or lock Orion back away, or stand up again in that blazing inferno that had been intended to save everything, but now, was going to destroy it.

He had no desire to stand up in the outside world again.

_I killed Holly._

And that was all that needed to click.

"-Artemis, hurry, there's not much time- come on, come on, we've got to stop-"

"No," Artemis said, and pulled his arm free.

"-no time- _no?_ You said- _no?!"_ His alter spun around, and he was panicking, now; he could see the fear in burnt deep all the way through his human and stolen fairy eye. "Artemis-"

"No," he said again. His head continued to spin, and his heart continued to lurch, and it was a feat of magic by itself that he remained on his feet at all. He could barely hear himself speak and it was even harder to see, but still, the words stumbled on; he heard the words as if from a mile away, the rest of him trapped in a crushing freefall without end.

"All three of us have to consent, for either of us to break through now," he said back, dazed, dizzy, calm. "All of us have to agree, if we were to work together. I believe Orion most clearly does not any longer. And even if he does, Hecate- I hereby revoke mine." Limply, with all the dazed fragility of a broken child, Artemis let his legs sag until he hit the back wall of his own mind, and there, quite contently, he sunk.

Holly was gone, and it was because of him.

Now, his body was currently bleeding to death in a building that was on fire, and the chances of him being able to fight his way back to the forefront, seize control, and stop the bleeding in time, were just too low.

The obstacles was insurmountable, and he no longer had it in him to fight them.

He was never going to step foot outside of his own mind ever again.

If that meant that the place that the Russians had meant to become his prison was going to be his funeral pyre instead, then so be it.

Hecate, somewhat predictably, did not look very comforted by these words.

In fact, standing wildly there across from him, panting and eyes shocked wide, was the very first time that he'd seen in him actual fear.

It would have been nice, if it had been a victory.

It wasn't.

"Are you scared, Hecate?" he asked, tilting his head. A pathetic smile tugged its way into existence and he let it without a moment's thought; let its guilt clutch deep around his very soul. "Hmm? You're- what is it; do you know? Orion is every part of me cares about Holly, and nothing beyond it. You, though? Do you know what you are? I've thought about it, now, and I think I have my answer."

" _Artemis!"_ He was screaming, now, desperate and so, so _scared;_ eyes that were nothing but terrified stared back and he tugged on his hand again, so violently it nearly ripped out of the socket. "Artemis, we don't have time, let's go! _Let's go! ARTEMIS!"_

"You're my ambition, my plans; you are everything that I, Artemis Fowl, can be, unburdened by those pesky feelings that come along with the possession of a conscience. I know, Hecate, because I used to _be_ you."

_Deep beneath the layers of deviousness, you have a spark of decency._

"So you're scared, aren't you? You don't want to die. It's about all you're afraid of, but you're terrified of it, Hecate, aren't you?" Artemis smirked again, and this time, when Hecate started to advance, he did not flinch. He did not pull away in terror.

He did nothing besides touch the gold coin resting on his chest, and smile.

_Perhaps you should blow on it, occasionally._

"Well, I'm afraid there's nothing that I can do for you. Because you are going to sit here, and watch me die."

_I'm so sorry, Holly._

_There's no spark left to grow._

For several stricken, breathless moments, his terrified alter just stood across from him. Panting as if he'd sprinted a mile, trembling as a leaf in the wind, and his _(Holly's)_ eyes so wide it was as if the heartstopping fear had eaten over his entire face.

When his alter lunged again, Artemis was ready for it.

He was also past caring.

Hands tore at him, hauling at his arms and chest then to clutch at his face and neck. _"Get up!"_ Hecate cried, and yes, he was begging, now- begging for his own pale imitation of life. "Get up, you cowardly- _do as I say, Artemis!_ You think you can tell me no?! This is _my_ body! I'm the only one who deserves to be out there and you _will_ do as I say- do you hear me, Artemis?! _Artemis!"_

Soon, sure enough, he found himself on his feet anyway, dragged up there then pinned back to the wall by Hecate. It did not matter; none of this mattered, it was all so inconsequentially, undeniably _not real_ there was not a single facet of the universe that this _mattered_ to. If he and Orion did not consent, then Hecate was just as trapped as them.

And he would not consent.

_Holly..._

_"GET UP!"_ Hecate screamed, right there in his face. "Artemis-"

"No," he croaked, and smiled back.

This, evidently, was the last straw.

Hecate scratched and howled and cried, a flailing child set in a time out that wasn't going to end. He was shoved back against the wall so hard his virtual vision burst with stars and a pain that was all phantom shot behind his eye, and then it was very _real_ pain; kneed in the stomach, legs kicked out from under him in a maddened fit-

 _"I killed our weakness!_ I killed our _one_ weakness, but you- _you should be down on your knees thanking me!_ You, Orion, how _dare-?!_ Holly-"

Hecate panted again, breaths heaving and split down the middle with the strains of lethal panic. He hauled one heavy hand back over head, turned as if to hit him again-

And then, his eyes locked onto Artemis' fairy one, and something in him twisted from terror into black, all-consuming rage.

He twisted his hand back around, fingers curled now and desperate gleam overrunning as wet hatred in his eyes, and brought his hand down across his face to white out his entire existence except same pain.

Blood spurted, entirely nonexistent, utterly unreal blood that was yet just the same as the blood coating Orion's wrist. He felt it slick his hands a millisecond before anything else, but then there was agony, then Hecate was screaming, then there was stomach-wrenching horrified shock-

Hecate had tried to scratch his eye out.

_Holly's eye._

Wet, slick red spilled across his vision as paint across a canvas. He jerked and howled, clutching at his eye as Hecate paced and hit and screamed, it wasn't even _real_ but the deep furrows clawed through him like ice, it was deep, it was bad, it was- it was ludicrously _funny,_ he couldn't-

_Gouge the eyes out, Master Artemis, and no, sir, I don't mind if it ruins your pianist fingers-_

So Artemis had been the only one not to listen during Butler's lessons, then.

A pathetic, straggling smile lurched into place, and even as Hecate flailed and scratched on, everything important in his mind simply shut down, and gave up.

He was not getting out of this one.

 _Butler,_ he thought dazedly. Pain numbed his every thought, and perhaps it was a little bit blood loss, too. _I am sorry, old friend. Please, don't blame yourself for not being able to help me. Please, this time, move on._

_The People. Please, don't judge the rest of humanity for my mistakes. Some day, someone else will find you, and I beg of you, give them the same chance that you gave me. We need a second chance, so don't let me be the end of the amazing future that there can still be._

_Mother, I'm sorry I was not the son you wanted. I'm so, so sorry for all that I've hurt you._

_Father, I'm sorry that I was not a son that was good enough._

_Myles, Beckett... don't be me._

Artemis blinked dazedly, or, at least, he tried to. One eye, too swollen and filled with blood to pull it off; the other hazy, weak, tired. Hecate raved in the room across, screaming, stretching for the door over and over- but he was weak now, too. He slipped and fell on his knees, the grasp of his desperate hand one that was wavering and weak, then hit his stomach with a dazed cry.

He was dying, Artemis realized.

Orion was losing blood. His brain, bit by bit, was shutting down.

_We're all dying._

_...huh._

A quiet, dizzy contentment settled over him, for the very first time since he'd set foot into the past.

So, this really was how it was going to end.

His mindscape flickered and flamed, fractures disintegrating into black dust and corners melding into nothing. Hecate struggled, still, he kicked and gasped as he crawled for death's door, but it didn't matter, anymore. Even if he somehow could crawl his way back to the outside world, they'd already lost too much blood.

He was going to die, right here on the floor of the Russian mafia's home.

His plan had succeeded, as it'd turned out. None of this was ever going to happen again.

He also just wasn't going to be around to see it.

Flames blazed on, outside his body. Orion bled and Orion burned, and Hecate screamed, and Artemis...

The strains haunting piano echoed in his crumbling mind underneath the streaks of falling blood. _Chopin's Sonata No. 2,_ he thought, halfway delirious and all the way smiling.

The floor underneath him disintegrated, crumpling into a nonexistent powder of nothing, and as easily as a baby into a crib, he fell back into the enveloping darkness.

_Holly..._

_I'm... sorry..._

* * *

When Holly found him, she was so relieved that her knees went weak, and she very nearly collapsed, right then and there.

He was alive.

"Lieutenant," she ordered, nudging her helmet back just a little more secure. Later, she could be a desperately relieved friend. _Later,_ she could scream and shout and possibly try not to cry at him. Right now, this situation needed an officer, and that was still who she was going to be. "Lieutenant, come in. I've found the target. Prepare for an emergency evac."

_"Yes, ma'am. Standing by."_

The instant the words came through, Holly shut off her mic, keeping her helmet on to protect from the smoke but dropping to her knees on the scorching hot floor to crawl, not for Artemis yet, but the still sparking source of the fire. There was a lighter in her friend's hand, but the problem was the cut and white-hot wires by his side. Smoke still billowed on upwards, so noxious and thick that she was going to have to give Artemis' lungs a magical scrub down, and even now flames still spat out like little fireworks, catching on the cracked screens of nearby monitors and sending servers smoking.

He'd started an electrical fire?

"D'Arvit, Artemis," she muttered, patting out the smoking wires firmly down with Foaly's fireproof gloves. The fire hadn't had long enough to spread too far beyond this room but the intense heat and flames had already surely ruined the data in here, and all she could say was she damn well hoped the Russians had backups, because there was no mind wiping their way out of this one.

Given the growing crowd of mesmerized, dazed idiots outside, she was already losing hope that they'd be able to mind wipe their way out of any of this at all.

Whatever scraps of luck Holly had had left must've all been dumped right into this room, because the fire was somehow small enough still that she could smother it out with little more than a few good stomps of her boots and some very careful maneuvers in her sort of fireproof but still not death proof suit. Little spots of flames still flickered here and there, smoke hung in the air, and the sparks were just so _intense_ she could feel them burn on her suit, but the source had been put out, and in this mess, that was all she had time to do.

Which left her, alone, with Artemis.

_Who... still hasn't moved._

Nearly every scrap of relief fizzled away to leave her cold, damp, and dark.

_Oh, no._

Artemis lay still, just where the slumped Irish genius had been the very moment she'd entered the room. Propped against the wall and then fallen over to his left side, his pale ash-brushed face shadowed over by hair that was too long and his body so soullessly limp he could've been dead. He wasn't. She stared at him right through her visor and it told her that his heart was still beating, there were still vital signs and that dammed troublesome brain of his was still working, but- he wasn't moving. Through all that she'd done, stamping out the fire that he'd surely started, putting a permanent end to his entire messy, stupid plan, he had not moved an inch.

_Why isn't he moving?!_

"Artemis," she gasped, his name almost a prayer. "Artemis, you piece of-" She fell to her knees, writhing to get her grip underneath him and try to heave him over. He was so much bigger than her, now, growing up every day, so much so it was actually hard to flip him laboriously over onto his back for his limbs to spread and his head to loll back bobbing like a lifeless doll's- his _eyes,_ his half-lidded, staring, _empty eyes-_ "Talk to me! Talk to me, Mud Boy! Where are you hurt; what do I fix?! _Artemis!"_ His face was streaked with soot and ash and his eyes were glazed, but there was no injury, there, not that she could see, and running her fingers through his hair found no lump on his head or swelling bruise against his skull.

His torso was next, and she yanked his already stained to all ruin shirt apart so hard the buttons sprang to life, but underneath there was no injury, either. Where _was it?!_ He was unconscious for _some reason,_ plainly, and there was so much _blood-_ where was it all coming from? There were scattered burns along his extremities, red raw bands of skin from where he'd evidently just sat next to a fire to die, and the faint impression of old bruises even underneath those, but that wasn't it... none were bleeding enough, none were bad enough, where...?

It was in another hard shove, Holly desperately trying to turn the much bigger, heavier Mud Boy over onto his stomach as his limp, heavy arms flopped about, that she saw it.

A deep cut, bisected straight through the delicate skin of his wrist. From it was a long wash of sticky, dripping blood, scattered in an ever spreading puddle that soaked through his back and her knees... and the reddened shard of glass, lying limp in his even limper her hand.

Her heart stopped.

Artemis had tried to kill himself.

In that moment, just that one, crouching there eight years in the past and with hopelessness in her arms, fire flickering around her, and Artemis' blood at her feet, she had nothing except heartbreak.

And then, magic sparked, and that heartbreak morphed straight into sheer, unadulterated fury.

"You stupid, self-destructive, _infuriating Mud Boy- I don't think so!_ " She yanked her gloves off and planted both hands firmly on Artemis' skin, one over that disgusting wound in his wrist and the other grasping right over his heart. "Do you think I came all this way back here for you just to watch you die?! Gods damn you to hell, Artemis Fowl, keep breathing, or am I going to pull your heart out and make it beat myself! _HEAL!"_

Her magic overflowed and sparked as brilliant as lightning down through a clear sky. Blue sparks shone on her fingertips and collected to Artemis' wrist, eating straight past the thick stains of hot blood to stitch and seal his torn skin straight shut. He fought her, still- he bucked under her hands with that tiny influx of sparks alone, bone pale and desperate, and when she sent a second wave a vanishing moan slipped out his throat, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter even when he started shaking, and it didn't matter even as his unconscious face spasmed and contorted in an unconscious cry of pain.

It was just as Foaly had said. After everything that he had been through, magic, right now, was hurting him just as much as it was helping him. _She_ was making him sicker, right in this very instant.

She did not fall back. Tears stung in her eyes, spilling hot and hard down her cheeks, and a grief-stricken apology swelled into her throat until she nearly sobbed it out right onto Artemis' trembling chest, but still, she did not fall back.

If she made him sicker, then so be it.

If he was sicker, at least he'd still be _alive._

"Keep breathing," she whispered, voice cracking. And he did. He _did!_ "That's it, Artemis, there you go... I've got you..." She hefted his shivering wrist once, cradling the ice-cold limb between her own hands to trace the still forming scar on his wrist. No new blood. Good. Now, just to replenish all the blood that he'd already spilled. "All right, Artemis. Bear with me, just for a little bit more... because I'm pretty sure this is going to hurt."

Artemis' mismatched eyes flickered once. He gave a slow, grating sort of moan, too anguished and too tired and too _broken_ to bear, and his head rolled limply back and forth in what was little more than an unconscious shudder. He was in pain, not awake, and what she'd just done to keep him not awake instead of not _alive_ had just made him that much worse and there was nothing she was going to be able to help that.

It was debilitatingly awful.

It was also the best thing that she'd seen all damn day, because that right there was enough to prove _he's still alive._

_He's still with me._

The second wave of magic did, indeed, hurt him. She felt it with every last twitch and shudder right underneath her hands. She saw it in the sudden bloom of red in his chalky face, the flood of warmth that was just a degree too high for a human, the way his hair stood up as if shocked with static electricity and his eyes rolled back up into his head. She saw it in the twitchy way his hand shook, the way it tapped in patterns of erratic fives, the moans that spilled past his lips, the full-body spasms that shook through his frail chest right into her.

But he kept breathing.

Even when the agonizing spell was done, and errant shudders still jerked down through his spine as if she'd shocked him, not healed him, blue sparks fizzing at his lips and dusted in his hair, _he breathed._

Tears once again burned in her eyes, and in the horrid silence that spread in the basement of that Russian prison, slowly, her entire world crumbled down around her.

How could he have done this? To Butler, to his family, to _her?_ Of course he wasn't in his right mind... the Artemis that she knew would never have even thought of it, but this might well have _not_ been the Artemis that she knew. She already knew about the Atlantis Complex, she knew he was mentally ill, she knew after months of Opal's mental torture he was probably scared and confused and lost, as much as Artemis Fowl could be any of those things. She knew he didn't think he could trust any of them and had run all the way back here, countries and years away, just to survive.

But this-

He was _Artemis Fowl._

No matter how sick, no matter how scared, no matter how unwell, the Artemis Fowl that she knew would never, _ever,_ give up.

And now, after she'd run countries and years away herself, and risked _everything_ to try and track him down-

Now, deep in this ugly, dark, filthy room, in a warehouse out in the middle of nowhere in frozen Russia, everything had almost become _nothing._

"Artemis," she croaked, her heart shuddering. Carefully, gently, she lifted his head, elevating it halfway to help him breathe, but then her other hand found its way to his cheek and she nearly burst into tears. "Come on, Arty, I know you're in there... just talk to me, _please._ We'll fix it, whatever it is, we'll make this right- please, open your eyes... _Artemis..."_

He moaned weakly again, a dry and cracking death croak that was so horrible she nearly wanted to cover her ears and sob. And in that moment, there, with Artemis slumped and half-dead in her arms, so badly hurt and all of it because of _her,_ Holly decided right in that moment that Opal Koboi was not going to get out of his alive.

They might not have been able to keep Artemis safe this time. So the very least they could do now was ensure that there would _be_ no next time.

And then, with the fluttering injury of a butterfly half-crushed underfoot, his half-lidded eyes flickered all the way open.

For the second time that day, her heart almost stopped.

Artemis blinked hazily several times, eyes glazed, mouth slack. It was abundantly clear that he was still dazed, and for once, Holly could even sympathize; he'd been through a hell of a lot in just the last ten minutes alone, and especially for someone as out of shape and ill as him. He probably badly needed to rest. Unfortunately for him, there was no time to allow it.

Holly swallowed hard, desperately trying to quiet the emotion gathered in her throat, because the last thing either of them needed was her crumbling apart in tears all over him, and reached deep within herself to somehow manage a trembling smile.

"Hey," she said. She leaned forward, pressing her hands over his heart again to feel it beating, ensuring it was steady, ensuring it was _there._ And then, because there was a million and one words desperately unsaid between them, and neither of them were remotely capable of addressing any one of them now, she asked, "Are you feeling all right? I'm... sorry, Artemis, I can't heal everything right now, but if there's anything that you think needs treatment right away, I can do it. You just need to trust me."

_Trust me, Arty._

_Please._

The dazed human blinked once. His blue eye was murky and his hazel one was, too, at first. Then, even as she watched, he blinked again- and this time his fairy eye overflowed with the thinnest line of blood.

Then, his face stretched into a huge, manic grin, and he socked her right across the face.

"You shouldn't have done that, little brat."

* * *

_"...temis..."_

_"...wake up..."_

* * *

Holly landed, skidded back on her own two feet with her wings vibrating and her hand already settled down on her weapon's holster. Her tears dried like rain in a desert, and her gun was up and out in the same instant as the bloodstained human rose, lanky and grinning, to his feet.

"Hecate," she snarled, and clicked the safety trigger straight off.

And the human boy, controlled by something who was very much not her friend, smiled.

"Captain Holly Short," he drawled. Wound sealed shut, he still dripped with fresh blood, his hands coated red and his front soaked with it, and his face smeared even by Holly's own hands. "I'm flattered- you got the name right, this time. Now, tell me... just how _did_ you swim your way out of that river?"

"I'm half fish," she said flatly, and flipped her Neutrino from _knockback_ to _stun: non-lethal._ " _You're_ the one who did this, aren't you? You slit Artemis' wrist. You tried to kill him."

There was a slippery smile across Hecate's face again, not her friend at all but the twelve year old child that if it'd had served his needs, would've watched the world burn. "Perhaps. Perhaps it was another friend of ours you have yet to meet. Perhaps it was Artemis himself..." He trailed off into a languid, easy shrug, smile still firmly in place, and cracked his knuckles one by one. "Who knows?"

Holly's eyes narrowed.

_There are other alters, then._

Foaly was going to have a field day. Butler was going to have a heart attack.

"I don't care which one of you did it." She took another careful step back, wings buzzing and magic sparking just underneath her skin, every nerve on edge and every inch of her ready to act. "You have three seconds to stand down, or I will make the choice for you, Hecate."

"Hm." Smiling slightly still, the shadow of her friend tilted his head advanced a step nearer and shook his limbs out, examining the healed scar, the half healed burns, the myriad of injuries that should've at least slowed him down, and _would have_ grounded Artemis- but this was not Artemis.

And then, once again, not-Artemis smiled.

"I don't think I shall," he said.

This was all that it took for Holly to get herself embroiled with a fist fight with her best friend's body.

* * *

_"Artemis!"_

_"WAKE UP, ARTEMIS!"_

* * *

Holly Short was smaller than him, faster than him, more experienced than him, and unburdened by both injury and illness.

Hecate, meanwhile, was about twice his opponent's size, did _not_ weigh barely 80 pounds soaking wet, and, unlike Holly, had absolutely no inclination to ensure this fight ended with the both of them hale and hearty.

Suffice it to say, he was _really_ enjoying this.

"I'm not going to give you a chance to crawl away this time, Captain," he needled, dancing back careful on light feet. _Keep your elbows in, on the balls of your feet, just like Butler taught.._ "However you got away last time, it won't work again!"

The dangerous fairy kept her mouth shut in response, mismatched eyes blazing as she darted in and back, feigning left, ducking right. Her blows were quick but sharp all the same, driving the breath straight out of him, but she was too small and too wary of hurting his already injured body to go for the kill.

That was all the weakness he needed.

He punched forward once, twice, three times; she ducked twice, sprawled once. The tiny child's body slammed back with beauty and violence, her head smacking against the concrete wall with an earsplitting _SMACK_ and a muffled cry, and she was just so weak, so small, such a _failure;_ he beamed and laughed and soared, he _WON_. This was his challenger?! This was all that stood between him and triumph? _THIS,_ this pathetic little _CHILD?!_ In the slippery darkness of the scorched room he prowled forward again, laughing and trembling and _triumphant,_ and the very instant his hand trailed against a chai, he hauled it in the strongest throw he had to smash against the tiny, gasping figure crumpled already in the corner.

He wanted her, as Artemis had said, _gone._

He wanted her _DEAD._

 _"GET UP!"_ he shouted, and unlike Orion, unlike Artemis, he _would_ be obeyed. "Get up and face me!"

Holly's eyes narrowed, the little elf still sprawled and panting for barely an instant more; then she blurred out of existence right before his very eyes. Shielding, just like Artemis had known they could do. _Cowards._ Hecate snarled, backpedaling to a wall even as he raised his hands up to protect his head, listening hard in the inky blackness of the room.

"Coward- _coward!_ Is this how you got to Artemis, then?! You sneak up on him in the dark and stab him in the back?!"

Sure enough, actually, the next punch came right in the back.

Holly just got an even harder blow to the head after it, dazing her frail form back into visibility and downwards like a pathetic child down to a bug to be squashed under his boot.

Hecate grinned.

She wasn't going to ever touch them again.

Wheezing and stumbling, Holly blurred back into his vision with a limp and split lip, her eyes blazing, her gun aloft. "I would," she spat blood, " _never_ hurt Artemis." Her eyes sheened with the faintest glimmer of magic even as she stepped still backwards again, as wary as a baby rabbit in a hunter's trap. "And he knows it!"

"Know- _knows it? Ha!"_ Momentarily, quite nearly fatally dumbstruck, he dropped his fist for the tiniest of moments just to turn his head back and laugh. "Knows- my dear _Princess Holly,_ Artemis is _terrified_ of you! He knows what you did; he knows what you did to his family, what you and all your friends are doing to _him!_ Knows you'd never hurt him- are you _blind?!_ He ran this far to get away from you!"

There was only a flicker of hurt there, just the tiniest glimpse of apprehension behind those hard as iron eyes. Her disgusting face, the eye she'd _stolen,_ the three long _years_ the fairies had ripped away-

_And she's here to do it all over again-_

Sick, full-blooded loathing burned down through him from head to toe, and his fists curled so tight his nails drew blood.

_That wretched, whining, conniving, rancid **scum...**_

And then, before his very eyes, her gaze transformed from hurt, into pitying.

_PITYING!_

"You're..." She did not lower her weapon, she did not back away, but something about her softened even as dangerous magic continued to glow on in her very eyes. "You're trying to protect him, aren't you? You're trying to protect Artemis."

Oh, what was this, now? First he got the psychoanalytic babble from Artemis; now it was from this whining elf, too? _Gods._ "You know nothing," he spat, and kept his distance across the room. With that dangerous weapon, it was much safer to let her get in close than the other way around.

Except she wasn't getting in close, this time; still, she stood across the room, and while her gun stayed up her eyes looked so intensely apologetic, suddenly _hopeful,_ it was just a fucking embarrassment. "Listen to me!" she pleaded, "Listen- Hecate, Artemis if you can hear me- we know what happened! We know what you're here to do, we know what's been going on, now, but we're not responsible for what you think we are! It's not what you think! Please, just give us a chance to explain! _Talk_ to us, Artemis; let us make this right!"

"You think he can talk to you?! You think he can do _anything_ at all?! Tch." He cracked his knuckles again; sore, from the many punches, bleeding across one or two, but his hands were already so red from what Orion had done, it barely made the slightest hint of a difference. Soon, there was going to be even more. "You're lying, and worse, you're lying to a brick wall. You're too late."

"He might not be able to act, but I know he can hear me! And I'm _n_ _ot_ lying! Listen to me, both of you!" She shoved her visor up and Hecate flinched back, shuddering away from the deadly mesmer, but there was no magic and instead just a stolen eye staring right into his own with such cowardly sincerity he could almost hear the screaming again in the back of his mind. "This was all Opal! She tricked you, Artemis! She wanted you to do this, to make us hunt you down, to make us enemies- _think_ , Artemis, come on! I know you're not stupid!" She inched desperately forward again, one hand even reaching out; one hand tight around her gun, the other outstretched with those dammed pitiful, sad, miserable _eyes._ " _Think!_ Opal's not here anymore, she didn't follow us back here, so it's just us, now, Artemis! It's just you and me- now that she's not in your head- come on, Artemis, _think!_ You know that we would never hurt you, not like this!" She stepped to him again, reaching out, faithful, desperate, _hopeful-_ "Artemis-"

_"THAT IS NOT MY NAME!"_

Holly, at last, froze.

Far too late for it to matter.

 _"Stop it,"_ he screamed, _"STOP IT!_ I am not Artemis, I am not Orion, I am _me!_ I am Hecate Fowl and I am _not_ subservient to the whining _baby_ inside my head! You want to protect Artemis? I don't _CARE!_ I am so much more than he could ever be and you, _you,_ dragging him down, in our way, always _there-_ always right _there-"_

She had been there since the very damn beginning, the very day he'd split from Artemis and existed as little more than a nebulous, forming concept in the blackest, most forgotten recesses at the back of his head. Holly had always been there, and Artemis had always been there, too- and after those interminable months locked away with Orion in the twists and turns of Artemis' psychosis, now that he was free, now that he was _finally free-_

_Everyone is always in **my** way..._

_"My name,"_ he roared, " _IS HECATE FOWL!"_

And gun forgotten about entirely, he lunged.

She did not shoot him.

He saw her mechanical wings vibrate, her little feet lift gently off the floor. He saw the split lip disappear, the streak of blood down the side of her face turn into a stain without origin. He saw the hope and pity in her eyes freeze and shatter like ice, and left behind was nothing but solid, black determination.

He saw, in the same breath as solid, breathtaking rage took him straight through his heart, her mismatched _stolen eye_ start to haze over with magic.

 _"Hecate,"_ she commanded. _"Sit down this instant."_

His legs wavered, once. A liquifying weakness that trembled in his knees, and the same numb defeat that began to tighten in the pit of his stomach.

_No..._

_"Hecate."_ She hovered closer, the chime of suggestion chorusing into an opera of demand, screaming magic that howled in his ears as a galestorm. _"You will sit down this instant. You will listen to me. You will do as I say."_

The mesmer... their cursed mesmer, again... they'd controlled Artemis before with it, she wanted to do it again... _no_ not again, _no,_ not again...

His legs shook, his knees started to sag-

_No, no, no..._

_"HECATE FOWL, SIT DOWN THIS INSTANT."_

Something lethal in him snapped, and stolen magic shot through him from head to toe.

_NO!_

* * *

_"He's hurting her, Artemis, stop him! We have to stop him!"_

_"He's shutting us out! We can't stop him, he can't even hear us- Holly-"_

_"HOLLY!"_

* * *

Just like that, there was no mesmer.

Just like that, Holly had no power.

Just like that-

_I have won._

Magic overrun through him through every inch of his body. He felt the stolen sparks vibrate on his hands, in his feet; he burned underneath the heat that swarmed over his chest to eviscerate his very soul. The world flickered bright blue and back then bright blue again, a sapphire gnat storm coalescing so thick over even his eyes that for a heartbeat he could see nothing at all but the sheer force of _magic._

And there, little Holly, little traitorous, lying, _betrayer_ Holly lay, crumpled down on the bloody floor, and her little traitorous, lying, betraying face, swam past with true, unadulterated fear.

Hecate grinned so hard it felt as if he would burst.

_I have finally won._

_"What is it?!"_ he cried, a euphoric rush burning through his very blood. "You didn't realize I had stolen magic again, did you?! You did not realize that I am not your powerless, cowering Artemis! _You don't know what I can do!"_

The fairy flinched back on the filthy ground, stricken and gaping as a gasping fish. She did not speak, barely even breathed, the same terror in her eyes that had burned there the day he'd held her out over the water.

It wasn't good enough.

He needed _more._

"I am going to kill you, Holly Short. Do you hear me?" He knelt, drawing down to just one knee, but still Holly remained beneath him and still, his stolen magic screamed in his mind louder than Artemis and Orion combined. " _You_ have been holding me back since the very day we first met. You have hurt Artemis, again and again, and worse than that- he can't even let you go! No matter _what_ you do to him, he _just- keeps- crawling- BACK!"_

The world around him snapped in blue fire, sparks that burned in his mind and crawled through his body like a poison. They pulsed and ate and _hurt_ and he cried out, but they were _his_ to control and he'd bear an eternity of this pain if it kept _her_ away.

Except she did not stay. Except at his cry, she straightened to her own knees with fear _of_ him born straight into fear _for him. "Stop!"_ she cried, reaching out desperately, "Stop, Hecate, you're hurting h-"

_"SHUT YOUR MOUTH!"_

"Artemis-"

 _"NO!"_ Hecate pushed closer, one hand shot out to pin her tiny body against the muck-covered wall, but it was not enough. Never enough. She _always got free._ She always found them, always _dragged them back,_ always- "You will listen to me! _You,_ Holly Short, _have destroyed us!_ You took our memories, you took Butler, you took years of our life, and then, then- just when I think you can not _possibly_ take another thing more- _you take everything that Artemis is away!_ "

He barely heard the scream, this time; there was nothing else beyond the howl of magic in his ears. Nothing at all but the scream of intoxicating, addictive _mine_ in through every centimeter of his boiling blood, and the release of everything that he was and ever had been- down onto the one who had made him.

"I've watched him- we've been imprisoned there in the back of his head, we were stuck there for _months,_ and do you know what he's done? Do you know all that we heard and saw him do? He can't bear who we are, what we can be; he's torn himself to pieces because of the guilt _you_ gave him! _You,_ Holly!" A hand raised to backhand her before he'd even grasped what he was doing, but then he saw the stolen eye, there, stunned and horrified right there on her face, and agony speared through _his_ fairy eye so severely it nearly split him in half. "He loathes all that's he done... stupid boy, foolish boy- we never did anything that was not necessary! We have never been anything that we did not need to be, that did not remake the world around us into something _more,_ but now he can't bear it! Now he sulks and drives himself mad because _you_ convinced him he was wrong! _You_ broke him, Holly- but somehow, he just keeps crawling on his stomach right back at your feet!"

The elf looked truly terrified, now, face so _scared_ it was delicious, but it _wasn't enough._ She was scared, and he-

He was terrified.

A whole world of ability to command everything that there was to his every whim; a potential that rose to the sky and shattered it, _anything_ he could _ever_ want _always_ at his fingertips-

And even now, she was still there to block him from it.

_She's always there... she's always here..._

_She's... always... fucking... here..._

And he'd had enough of it.

_I will end her._

_Tonight._

"Do you know what you have done to him?" he hissed, slumped broken on all fours, now, panting out bursts of magic, all but vomiting up the sparks but still, he held firm, because he _had to,_ because this was the last chance he'd ever have and this was what he had to do. "Do you know how irrecoverably you have _w-wormed_ your way into our life? Orion and I, we split from Artemis' psychosis, we _are_ each a piece of him, and do you know what Orion is? He's just- he-" Hecate's upper lip pulled back in disgust and his stomach churned again, the madness of _that boy_ settling in his mind like mud. "He is Artemis' _you!_ Infatuation, adoration, affection, respect, _obsession_ \- everything about Artemis that thinks of you peeled off and made _him_ \- he can't even exist without breathing your name... he'd lick your boots if you asked him to," he spat. "And- and y-you'd think, Holly, if he got everything about Artemis that cares about you, then I'd be free of it... you'd think that, wouldn't you?!"

He'd thought so, too, once. When he'd been born in the very back of Artemis' mind and watched and bided his time, when he'd watched and _waited_ on for the very moment when he could break free, and become so much _more_ than a pale shadow of Artemis Fowl. He'd seen the world at his feet, and he'd known he could take it.

And then, from the very first breath that he had taken, Holly had been there.

Trying to stop him.

From his very first breath, everything about his existence had already been focused around Holly Short. Trying to end her lethal meddling in his life- and eradicate her agonizing guilt and seed of anguish, implanted right into his brain.

If he was Orion's opposite, and Holly was Orion's star- then she was not _nothing_ to him, as he had first hoped.

She was his black hole, and he would circle her, trapped, until she destroyed him.

His only hope was to take her out first.

The stolen demon magic fizzled inside him again, boiling higher and higher to a volcanic wave that stung in his eyes and soared in his heart. He curled a fist and glass bit into his hands, blood spilling, magic bleeding, and thus, he raised his hand, for what would be the last time.

 _"You,"_ he snarled, "have been here every time I opened my eyes. _You_ have followed us, every which way. You hold us back, every single time I've tried to break free... _you,_ Holly Short, are my weakness. You are Orion's infatuation, Artemis' guilt, my barricade- _you_ are always there to ruin us... and so I am going to take you out of the way."

Hecate lifted his hand higher, Magic blazed about his curled fist, and Holly's stolen, thieved eye shone with just this sheer light of anguished hurt, and Hecate beamed as Orion and Artemis screamed, because _this was it-_

* * *

_"One..."_

_"Two..."_

_"THREE!"_

* * *

"Lights out, Mud Boy," she said, and fired.

* * *

_And together, Artemis and Orion heaved the master control screen straight out of the wall, and crashed it into the floor of their own head._

_There was a flicker of brilliant sparks, instantaneous and cut off as an exploded firework._

_Then, nothing._

* * *

Hecate, his eyes as blank as the darkness outside and his face as vacant as the dead, hit the floor so lifeless that his head pillowed facefirst into Holly's lap. He slumped, still bleeding, now drooling, and his head lolled from her knee to smush right into her booted foot.

From the doorway, the elfin officer offered up a sharp grin, her Neutrino still hot, and lifted a hand up in a disciplined salute. "You took so long to get back outside, I figured that you could use the rescue, Captain Me." With an arced eyebrow, she glanced down at Artemis' motionless, dazed form, then about the scorched and destroyed room, and smirked. "Looks like I was right."

Holly, thoroughly shaken inside and out, was so shocked, haunted, stunned, and _relieved,_ that for that first stricken moment, sitting there limp against the blood-slicked wall, she could do nothing at all.

Then, an exhausted, crumbling collapse of a smile fell across her face, and the wave of relief was so powerful, it quite nearly bowled her over to pass out into the concrete.

"About time," she rasped, and smiled back up to the her own mirror image, save a face that was just eight years younger, and with two hazel eyes instead of one.

 


	3. The King

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank so much for the kudos and comments along the way! Final chapter!
> 
> This one took a little while because I got a pretty bad cold a bit over a week ago, and just couldn't clear my head enough to proofread. ...also I was kidnapped to see Endgame and my heart and soul got stomped to shreds. Regardless, as I said, I don't really have any other ideas for Artemis Fowl at the moment, but with the Disney adaptation coming around eventually, maybe that'll inspire me and others to write more. 
> 
> Until then, thank you all, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> (and as usual, any questions about things that I didn't explain in this weird little thing, I'll do my best to answer in the comments!)

_January 09, 1998, Somewhere in Poland_

It was so late at night that even many of the people-infested, light-pollutant human cities below had gone dark. All they had to guide them was the palest glow of the moon, and the even fainter flicker of charge along their visors.

When Holly dropped down through the thick treetops to stumble against the ground in a frantic collapse just one tumble away from a crash landing, all she'd had left was the moon: her visor lights had shut off.

Their wings had been running so desperately low on charge that if they'd gone for even one clearing more, she was pretty sure it would've been a crash landing anyway.

She stumbled along, her younger self right behind her, the ancient and heavy wings on her back sputtering so spastically that she was considering giving Foaly a punch for it, even eight years back into the present. There was no way around it: no matter the route, no matter how well she conserved power, no matter _what_ she did, flying from Ireland, to Russia, and back could not be done on one trip. Not on the tech available in her own time, but certainly not on the wings available for scavenging in 1998.

There was simply no way for them to make it back to Ireland, no matter how direly it was needed, without a stopover.

As sick as Artemis was, Holly determined, he was just going to have to bear with it.

Her younger self had landed just as heavily behind her, thudding down while somehow still keeping her mouth shut to wait for orders. Considering the utter mess of the situation, Holly supposed it even made sense, that she'd given up trying to get answers to just follow instructions some time ago. It surely had to be easier than making sense of this chaos she'd just been dropped right into. Eight years ago, a greener officer, desperate to prove herself, with more faith in the LEP to do the right thing than she had now?

She could see it.

In... herself.

_Yeah, that's never going to not be weird._

Clearing her throat with a hard, painful swallow, Holly unbelted her wings off and stepped away, trying to shake the uncertain confusion out like cobwebs to instead re-focus herself on the situation at hand. They were going to have to recharge, which she'd done on missions before, but... never quite like this.

Artemis, meanwhile, stayed, unmoving and insensate, on the hard ground.

"We've got another twelve hours until the deadline you gave me. Until the- ah. The time tunnel, closes," her younger self ventured at last, the words obviously unsure. "Are you sure you want to stop here? There's a base nearby; we could switch out our wings there..."

Holly nodded once, her gaze turned away from both Artemis and her companion. "Neither of us are supposed to be here. Artemis would probably be able to tell it better than me, but right now I just need to keep my hands off as many things as possible, and at this point I'm really not about to tempt fate anymore. If I get back to the present without blowing up the world in a paradox, I'm just gonna consider that a win." With a hard, stubborn tug, she cut the emergency power for her wings off, setting them up to begin recharging instead. At the speed they'd been traveling before, Ireland was just under six hours away. They wouldn't have time to recharge up fully, maybe, but...

 _Three hours,_ she thought determinedly, pushing her hair back from her eyes. That gave them enough time to get back to Fowl Manor, and enough of a window to deal with whatever was inevitably going to go disastrously wrong on the way.

Because after the past four days...

Yeah.

Yeah, something was going to go wrong.

"All right," Holly sighed, because this unbearable, expectant silence had really gone on for long enough. Rubbing exhausted eyes with the worn, aching fatigue of even more exhausted muscles, she climbed to her feet, brushing off the spare bits of grass and leaves and trying in vain to straighten herself out. Time to take charge. Again. "Can you keep watch for any other humans? I'm going to-... what in Frond's name are you doing?"

Her younger self, having recovered much faster than her on account of having slept sometime this past week, was already crouched back over next to Artemis' prone form, busy working enough to barely give her a careless shrug in answer. "Securing the prisoner," she said, and clicked the cuff shut to bind the human's wrist right to one of the roots of the tree.

"He's not a prisoner!"

"I walked in on you two with him ranting about he was about to kill you," the younger Holly said evenly, giving his wrist an experimental tug, then shifted to peer closer to his slack face. "How in the world underground did a Mud Boy get _magic,_ anyway...?"

"That's-..." Holly closed her eyes, a momentary shudder spasming down against her shoulders that was hard and uncontrollable. _He's not a criminal. Not anymore._ "...it doesn't matter," she rasped, swallowing hard. And it really didn't, because magic was the very least of what Artemis Fowl had stolen over the years and this time, she wasn't even so sure he'd meant to take it at all. "Listen, he's not going to want to talk to you. I'll keep him settled, so right now I really need you to keep watch for other humans. We'll take off again in no more than three hours."

It was a dismissal in as many words, and not a very kind one, at that, but, by gods, she _could not care._ This had been one of the worst weeks of her entire life and after everything they'd all risked for her to be here, after _everything_ that had happened and they'd nearly lost- she just did not have it in her to have to speak up and defend her best friend.

Even from herself.

The younger Holly frowned at her for a moment, silently appraising, but it seemed the sheer weirdness of staring at her own mirror image, time traveled in from the future, and glaring at her over a Mud Boy, got to her. With nothing more than a second careless shrug, the lieutenant raised her hands up in obedient surrender, then pushed to her feet without another word. She adjusted her holster, checking the settings, and glanced down to give the human one last look.

Then, she hesitated.

"Um, Captain?'

Was she _really_ getting annoyed at her own self? "What n-"

"He's awake."

She drove to an immediate halt.

"He's-" Stuttering and breathless, Holly dropped to her knees to lunge forward with an almost-gasp, one hand reaching for her weapon, the other for her friend. He was _awake?_ After all this time, she'd actually be able to talk to him, to settle everything once and for all- and his eyes were open! She could see it, now; he actually _was_ awake! "Artemis-" she said again, reaching out.

Then stopped.

His bicolored eyes _were_ open, yes.

And there was nothing in them.

Two slivered crescents, one dark blue, and the other a familiar hazel that was overrun with blood almost like tears. Each was very undeniably open- and each stared straight through her, and saw nothing. He looked almost as if he was asleep with his eyes open, but this was hardly her first time seeing him unconscious, and she knew very well that he did no such thing. Tentatively, almost hesitant, she waved a hand back and forth in front of them, but this made no difference.

He didn't even blink.

Her own eyes, a mirror image of Artemis', narrowed, and she fought back despair by every tooth and nail that she had.

_I don't think so, Mud Boy._

_I don't fucking think so._

With a harsh, clinical precision, she slid one hand up to his neck, the other resting flat on his chest. Heart, still beating. Lungs, still working. Good. "I've got it from here, Lieutenant, thank you," she ordered, a second dismissal, and this time didn't even turn to see her request unspoken request be followed as she backed off of her friend, just a little. Carefully, Holly cleared the area, dusting leaves and grass aside and locking her gun secure in her holster so no matter who it was in Artemis' body, they wouldn't be able to get their way.

Then, she focused back on her friend's pale, slack face, and thought.

Artemis was no longer just _Artemis._ Hecate had told her himself; there were pieces of him, now, all stuck inside his head, different fractures of who he was that had split all the way into semi-independent beings. Artemis was still in there, but some times- maybe most of the time, even- he was not the one in control of his own body. Sometimes it was Hecate. Sometimes it'd have to be the Orion that she'd only heard about so far, and never spoken to. Sometimes, maybe, it was another alter entirely that she had yet to meet.

And right now... none of them were in control at all.

Foaly had not told her anything about this, concerning Atlantis Complex. The existence of alters, yes, the existence of alters that might be unable to be reasoned with and _dangerous_ in ways that Artemis was not, yes. And she wasn't _worried,_ necessarily... if this was some sort of dissociative state, the right combination of magic and drugs by Argon would be able to bring him out of it. Everything after everything that had happened, she still had full faith in her best friend. She _knew_ he was strong enough to beat this _._

The only problem was, that was later, and this was _now._

They didn't have time to wait for him to do it on his own, and no matter how much she wanted to help him, she didn't have a clue what she was meant to do.

Foaly had advised her to try electric shocks, courtesy of her Neutrino, but after everything he'd already been through, she really wasn't about to _shoot him_ again unless there was no other option. Or any other kind of electric shock, period- his body really couldn't take much more. Magic, even if she'd known what to do, was just too risky to try at all... magic was the entire reason they were in this mess to begin with, and after the effect she'd seen it have on Hecate, there was a decent chance it could just kill him. No matter what, it _would_ hurt him. Healing his slashed wrist was one thing, but messing around in his head for something that wasn't even life-threatening was another entirely.

_Although..._

Holly narrowed her eyes, searching closer into the clouded, glazed eyes. Her stomach squirmed at the sight but she still searched into them, refusing to give in, refusing to yield to the sick-hearted _terror_ that he was gone. Because he _wasn't_ gone, and while using magic to drag the real Artemis out was too dangerous- the mesmer wouldn't really be magic used on _him_ , would it? The magic was all on her, and for Artemis, it should just be the power of suggestion. The power of really, really, really strong, unyielding, undeniable suggestion that was so strong that it'd kill him to say no, maybe, but the power of suggestion all the same. And if she phrased it right, if she allowed him the opportunity to fail without letting him say _no..._

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and focused.

If it didn't work, then no harm done.

And if it _did_ work, then she was finally going to be able to talk to her best friend face to face, with no more room for lies or half-truths in between them, for the first time in months.

She had to try.

_"Hello."_

Magic vibrated in her throat, a warm, comforting beat of energy that was familiar and close, and she willed it even stronger, not daring to push it to its limits but knowing she was going to have go above the bare minimum if this was to work. She opened her eyes, staring right into her friend's glazed own, and said, " _Can I speak to Artemis?"_

His eyes flickered once. The slightest of gravely groans cracked out from his throat, and then, he fell back into dead silence.

 _No._ Breathing deep and sure, Holly learned forward, cradling his face between her hands to give him nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. _"I know you're awake,"_ she said, staring right into his blank, unseeing eyes. He didn't look mesmerized, not yet, but she wasn't done yet, either. " _I want to speak to Artemis."_ Pause. Nothing more than dead silence, and even deader eyes. _"Artemis Fowl. If you can, come out and speak to me."_

_I know you're in there, Arty... and I'm done chasing after you._

_We are going to talk, and you are going to listen._

Once again, for several harsh, unbearably cold, miserable moments, there was nothing.

The smartest face she'd ever known held as vacant and lifeless as a dead rat, and if there really was anything left of _Artemis_ inside him, it was so far gone there was no sense in talking to him at all.

Then, with another aching groan that pulled out as agonizingly as broken glass scraped over skin, his eyes flickered a second time-

and _she saw him._

He blinked once again, this time not the glazed instinct of a body barely half-conscious but an entirely aware and completely alive response. There was no slow, groggy transition to consciousness; his sharp eyes were instantly awake, hesitancy and something unsure darkening them as his chalk-pale face twisted in open, honest anguish.

For one long, agonizing moment, they locked eyes.

Then his stare jerked jumpily straight down to his feet, and he looked so uncomfortable it was all she could do not to just reach out and hug him.

Still, she did not.

She had been with him three times in the past, so far. The first two, she had approached him as if he was her friend, and both times, found something very different behind his eyes instead.

This was the third.

She was not going to make that mistake again.

"Artemis?" she asked evenly, or, at least, as evenly as she could force it. As calm as she could ever pretend to be, because her heart was lodged firmly in her throat and her mind was racing and her chest felt so tight it was as if she'd sprinted a mile; was still running, still panting, still falling. Artemis would not look at her, and her heart skipped yet another beat and shuddered like it'd been clenched in a fist so tight it was clawing a bleeding furrow straight through. _Please... Artemis, please..._ "Is that you, Artemis?"

For one terrible moment, he did not respond at all.

Then, after several even more terrible, dead silent seconds, he gave a single, limp nod.

His pale, bruised face still turned away severely, eyes fixated away as if he couldn't bear to so much as look at her, and expression contorted all the way through to leave him sick at heart and mind, Holly wasn't even sure how he'd managed to respond at all.

And the worst part of it was, it didn't matter.

It still wasn't safe for her to treat him like a friend.

_Not yet._

"Prove it."

Artemis flinched faintly, a little shudder that shook down through his torso and flickered again in his stricken eyes. He still would not even look at her, and was trying his best to disguise it, but she knew him and she could see twist of agony and guilt on his face, plain as day.

She still did not apologize.

If he was her friend, then he would understand. If he was not her friend-

Well, she didn't give a damn what anyone in Artemis' head not named _Artemis_ thought.

"I'm... not sure how." The human coughed wetly, a thick, horrible sound, his sick body shuddering violently again but by the despairing look on his face, he didn't even care about the pain of it. "I have several theories, but at the present time, I'd advise not trusting anything that I say until you have confirmation on who's saying it." He closed his eyes again, another shadow of pain crossing across his face, and she could his throat jump as he desperately tried to swallow. "I'm... I'm so sorry, Holly."

 _No. I'm sorry. We're all sorry we didn't see this happening and stop it before it was too late._ "Well, we're going to have to figure it out somehow, because we need to talk." She swallowed the lump in her throat, trying to wrench her own exhaustion back out of the way to sift through everything that Foaly had told her about Atlantis Complex. _Any_ little detail at all, any little factoid that there was to make a distinction between the bits of personality locked in his own head.

No matter what, she was _not_ going to leave her ailing best friend cuffed to a tree, and sit there with him in dead silence, because she just _wasn't sure._

"The first time I heard you playing piano." Unable to help herself, she leaned forward, just a little, peering desperately into his shadowed eyes. _Come on, give me something... gods, just LOOK at me, Arty..._ "What was it?"

He still would not look at her. Didn't even try to pull away free from the tree, his untethered hand curling anxiously in the fraying, scorched hem of his shirt, oblivious to the red burns and faded bruises bled across his pale skin. But his mouth twitched and his eyes flickered again and, if she looked very closely underneath the streaks of blood, she could just find the beginnings of a smile. "I wasn't aware you recognized it. You should have said so... Chopin Etude in c minor, Opus 10, Number 12, oft referred to as the _Revolutionary Etude."_ He tilted his head back hopelessly against the very same tree he was bound to, that pale smile twisting into something that was all the way wrong and miserable, through and through. "It was calculated. I knew that you were coming, and I wanted to show off. I was still chafing slightly from the lollipop comment, and was convinced this would help you to view me as less of a child." He paused, face still clouded, then relaxed, degree by tiny degree, into a sad smile. "I truly was twelve years old."

Even while still smiling that miserable, defeated little smile up towards the moonlight above, he still would not look at her.

Wouldn't try to bring his eyes down to even get close.

Her own desperate, meager beginning of a smile died, and her heart clenched.

She actually had not recognized it, at the time. Foaly had been monitoring, babbling in her ear about how much he didn't trust a certain sneaky Mud Boy, and the instant the strains of piano had reached them, his suspicious babbling had turned into irritated rambling. _Boy's butchering it,_ he'd said, _can't believe it, Revolutionary- one of the only worthwhile contributions Mud People have got to the world and he's just D'Arviting butchering it..._

At the time, Holly had found it hilarious, because even to her ears, it had been rather clear Artemis had not been butchering anything at all. Foaly had just been annoyed to no end to, _once again,_ be confronted with something the tiny human had been impeccably good at, another piece of the puzzle that this little brat was just unequivocally _better at_ than him, and hadn't been able to bear not complaining about it. She'd remembered the name just because Foaly had chosen to harp on it, too, whining that _of course_ the brutal Mud Boy would choose something so violent.

Now, all she remembered was how young and boyish and _small,_ Artemis had been back then. A child staring up at her from a piano much too big for him, and small enough that she could look down at his proud smirk, and not just see the smug, heartless little brat that had wrenched her life to shreds-

But also just a boy, who badly needed a second chance.

Looking at Artemis now, slumped back against a tree, bleeding, ill, and torn to emotional shreds, blinking dazedly at the dark sky and barely three years older, he appeared as if he had aged decades.

For once, Holly could really get the feeling.

She closed her eyes, breathing in shakily and worn down to all hell, and went on.

"What is Butler's first name?"

Artemis' eyes flickered again, numb and half-dead. He still, it seemed, could not bear to look at her. "You don't know it," he whispered. "I told you that he told me what it was... however, I did not actually say it to you."

Holly grinned.

_Artemis: 2. Hecate: 0._

_So... let's see if he can go three for three._

"Why did you come here?"

Whatever was left of Artemis' already meager smile fell.

Holly, too, did not smile.

"Why are you here, Artemis?" she asked again, voice even and quiet in the dead night air. "What did you come here to do?"

For several moments, her friend did not answer her.

That question was the very heart of the matter. The answer to why Holly had had to be fished out of an ice cold river in the middle of winter, stranded in 1998 and dunked into the water by someone wearing the face of her best friend, Why she had left Butler and Foaly (and half the LEP) out of their minds waiting back in the present, and why she had found Artemis bleeding out in the Russian mafia's headquarters set ablaze. So many unbearable, unanswerable _whys,_ a question that all of them had only been able to miserably guess at themselves for days- because only Artemis had the true answer.

If it was Hecate, in his head, she could guess at what he would say. It was already horrifically obvious that Hecate had fallen for Opal's lies hook, line, and sinker. If it was any other new alter in his head- well, she didn't know what any of them would say, but she could at least hope that she would be able to tell it wasn't her friend.

And if it was Artemis, in there...

Then maybe she would finally hear the truth.

Once more, Artemis was quiet, at first, taking his time in finding the right words and deciding just how he would answer. There wasn't even the slightest trace of his earlier faint humor on his somber expression, still bone-white and thin underneath the dirtied streaks of ash. Everything about him now was just drained and limp, like he'd just been dunked into a pool of liquid defeat and taken a long soak.

And there, as she watched, his one free hand trailed limply off the ground to instead grasp loosely just at his heart. A gesture that she had seen him do many times before, so she knew exactly what it was: grasping for a charm that wasn't there, because Holly had seen it left behind in the present, just like he'd left behind them all.

A wave of cold loneliness came over her, so severe that she shivered down to her core.

"There was a voice in my head," he croaked, finally. His voice came out barely audible and no matter how hard she stared at him, he would not look back at her. "It's been following me for months. When... when I came back here to the past, that was the first time I'd even been able to think without its interruption since autumn. It told that me I had to. That you and all the fairies were conspiring against me, that even Butler had been turned onto your side, and that if I didn't act you were going to kill me." His eyes shuddered shut, anguish rolling across his face as a shadow, and, right there as she watched, another drop of blood rolled down from his fairy eye. "I... I was already having delusions, and I'd been having compulsions for even longer than that. After I started hearing this voice, I got even sicker. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat... I think Butler was about a week away from kidnapping me to take me to a poison specialist, when I instigated my plan. Nothing I had done helped in the slightest. I... knew there was something magical _wrong_ with me, but I couldn't trust _anyone..._ I thought about asking you for help so many times but I could never convince myself that you were still safe. I just kept getting sicker until I realized it was going to kill me if I did nothing, and... "

He trailed off again into silence, a failing croak in his throat to snuff out as dead and gone. The anguish contorted to a breath of agony, his throat jumping and his hand spasming convulsively against his chest to grasp the coin that they both knew wasn't there, because he'd taken it off.

Because he hadn't trusted her, to the point that he'd been dying, and had run away instead of picking up the phone.

"I was backed-" he coughed hard, heaving over to yank uselessly at his bound arm against the tree. One cough turned into a round of wet struggling as he fought for air, pitiful and desperate, so badly, painfully _ill_ it took every last fiber of her being to stay back and still, hands clenching in her lap just to stop them from reaching out to him.

Her magic was poison to him, and her words, after all that had happened between them now, might well not mean anything to him any more.

"I was backed..." he started again finally, when the round of coughing had subsided into silence. Frail and pathetic, broken down into a bare whisper of weakness- and honesty. "...into a corner, with no way out. The only thing in the world I was sure I could trust was the person in my head. It told me what to do, and I did it."

He stopped for several moments again, hoarse voice failing him to drop back into a cold silence. Artemis worked his mouth a few times, eyes still shut, then just sank backwards to look towards the sky.

"No one was supposed to get hurt," he whispered, and his voice cracked.

That was all that Holly could take.

 _"Artemis,"_ she sobbed, and flung her arms around him.

The human stiffened instantly underneath her, flinching not to get away from _her_ but instead to get away from himself. He didn't hug back, didn't even _try,_ but they had been through too much for that alone to forestall her and she squeezed him even tighter, her arms wrapped as closely around him as they could go and buried her head into the crook of his frozen shoulder. "It's okay," she gasped, and now she was crying and couldn't stop it. "No one _did_ got hurt. There's nothing that happened that can't be fixed and everyone that you care about is okay."

_You're the only one who's hurt, you idiot._

But Artemis held frozen, so stiff and shocked she knew that he didn't believe her. Of course he didn't, but instead of an interrogation he still only squirmed, trying to get away, but she couldn't let him go. "That- that can not possibly be true! Butler- my family-"

"Are _fine,"_ she promised. She couldn't bring herself to let go but did tilt her head back just enough to meet his panicked eyes, and when he tried to jerk away she pulled one hand out to keep his face still as the blood continued to drip down. "You parents don't have any idea what's happened, and Butler- he understands, Artemis. He knows what happened, and he's still with you. You..." A thought occurred to her then, a sinking realization that made her stomach churn. _Does HE even know what happened?_

"...Artemis," she started again, sobering with a wave of forced calm. "What, exactly, _do_ you think happened?"

Hecate may've been the one to try and kill her directly, but both of them knew, he had not dragged Artemis back here against his will.

The boy genius shook his head for a moment, consternation crossing across his bruised features, and he at last lifted his free hand. Not to hug her back, but instead rubbing it across his face, as if trying to physically push the confusion away and find tiny missed detail to force it all make sense. "I heard what you told me. Or-" He shook his head again, features contorting again, this time through a hurdle of pain. " _Hecate,_ but... I heard it. About Opal. And it- but of course, I'd considered the possibility before, I've already considered _all_ of the possibilities. I tried to think through everything before, but something feels... different, now. I feel- I don't understand." Artemis rubbed his head with a wavering hand, then, finally, he actually _looked_ back to her. Met her eyes for the first time with his own dazed and bloodshot, but _there,_ piercing in a way that only her friend's could be. "I feel better and worse, at the same time. So many of the symptoms are worse, but the compulsions are gone, as is the... dementia? Delusions? I'm not..." With a shaky, almost nervous laugh, he lowered his hand to stare it, turning it over so they could both see the streaks of ash and smears of blood. "What did you do to me?"

At the softest stirrings of paranoia, there, behind those quaking words, Holly once again fell still.

There were too many answers that she didn't have, and too many that Artemis badly needed, and, more than that, deserved.

However, Artemis was done waiting.

Whether she knew how to explain or not, she was the only one here.

Shaking her head to herself, forcing tears and desperate emotion back to clutch onto her best friend for one last second, Holly took a deep breath, then pushed back. She'd said they'd needed to talk, and she'd meant it. With a lingering sniffle, she withdrew just enough to finally go to work on the cuff on his wrist, keeping her eyes down and her gaze focused. "We'll try and talk it through. I can't promise you'll like what you'll hear, but no matter what, we're still on the same side. ...I'm sorry, about this. Er, again," she said, an eerie parallel to a conversation she'd already tried to have with him already, only to realize it wasn't with the right _him._ "I'm really sorry, I know you're hurt, but my magic will make you feel worse, Arty. I'll trust your judgment, on this... if there's anything you think can't wait until we get back to our time, I'll do what I can. But otherwise, it'll have to wait."

Every unhealed injury, she silently promised, they were going to inflict on Opal. Ten times over.

_If Butler hasn't already taken permanent care of her._

No one was going to get away with hurting one of her closest friends again.

As was to be expected, perhaps, Artemis remained as taciturn and withdrawn as ever. He still looked painfully shellshocked, almost vacant in a way that was downright disturbing to see in eyes so intelligent and quick. And at first Holly was almost relieved, because stunned or not, that was boundlessly better than physical agony or sickness, a pain that she would be able to do nothing for but sit there through him with and watch-

But there he sat. Blank as a stone, staring down at himself to look over all the injuries as if he'd never even seen any of them before. He looked like he'd been through with a round with a troll, and not very well, at that.

_(But he's sill alive.)_

"I think," he said at length, still blinking down at frayed sleeves, the lengths of his arms, "that I will survive at least through whatever explanation you still have not given me." There was another unsettled pause, and slowly, achingly, he moved his at last freed hand to push back one sleeve, turning his arm over so they could both see the scorched patchwork of red, blistering skin.

They both shuddered.

"That fire was supposed to wipe out any and all plans they'd ever had on the Fowl Star," he sighed, and it was with something that was almost a smile that he leaned his head back against the tree. "I'd threatened them with every scrap of fairy tech I could fake, and when they got back home they were meant to find it in flames and their servers wiped so severely that they'd realize I was generations ahead of anything they could do."

"...And then," Holly went on, when Artemis did not, "they wouldn't attack the Fowl Star. Your father never would have gone missing."

"No need for gold."

"No... us."

There was another chilling silence. Artemis' distant gaze remained glazed upwards to the sky, and his infuriatingly quick mouth stayed shut.

Holly closed her eyes for a breath, and kept herself as calm as she could.

She was going to have to go about this very, very carefully.

"I know what I've told you about Opal so far, but we believe that she was actually helped a little along by something else. We think that you have a... condition, Artemis. Atlantis Complex. Have you heard of it?" Tentatively, she shifted about to sit by his side instead of in front of him. When he did not flinch away, she reached out to touch his hand. It was tense and shaking, so stiff she could almost feel the hurt underneath, and her heart in her throat, Holly tried to guide it back down.

"I..." His brow furrowed. Another bad sign. "I can recall... yes. A dissociative, magical disorder. I considered it when I recognized the compulsions for what they were, but there were so many other unexplained- ah." At _last,_ some of that confusion faded away into the faintest grin of understanding, his eyes, already overbright with fever, losing their sharp glint in favor of solution to the puzzle. "I see, now."

Relieved, Holly nodded back. "Yes. It's as I said before. It _wasn't_ you, Artemis, it really wasn't." The rest of this was, once again, was going to need to be handled very carefully, and preferably by someone who knew more about Atlantis than she did. But there was still no one else here, and Artemis needed answers _now._ "I'm not sure what to tell you," she sighed, knees pulled up to her chest. "Foaly said if it was really bad, then I'd be able to help you with electric shocks. Temporary, but very immediate relief. You got one, when you got shot. That should've helped the symptoms for Atlantis, at least for a little bit. That's why you feel a little better, now. As for everything else..." She paused again, trying to gather her thoughts to make sense of it all as best she could. "I know you said some things feel worse, too. I'm guessing that's got something to do with Hecate about trying to fry himself with magic. You're already oversensitive to magic, right now, and he sat there using enough to blow us sky high, like an idiot. You saw that, right?"

She tried to smile. Tried to keep the words light and joking. Tried to ease him into a sense of security, to pretend _everything's normal_ and so much more than that, _everything's okay._

And, Artemis did smile back. Just a faint little expression, but it was there; a weak grin that was almost familiar and had desperately been all she really wanted.

And she could see in his eyes that it didn't even come close to touching the black despair, guilt, and helplessness that hovered between them like a storm cloud.

"I did see it," he said, a touch uncomfortably. "And if that's the case, I think I'm going to have to say that magic really does not agree with me."

"Or maybe it does, and you just shouldn't try and take on so much magic from a demon that it'd fry even an elf?" She nudged his side gently again, trying for a second teasing smile even though she already knew it was a doomed venture from the start. "Regardless, if you're alive now, it's certainly not going to come back to kill you later. You're going to be okay, Arty. Atlantis Complex is curable, and a good magical detox should really help everything else."

She didn't mention that, as was usual, for Artemis Fowl, this was all ground that had never before been tread. No one knew how much they were going to be able to help him. No one knew how sick he was still going to be, at the end of this, and there were fears that just because they'd stopped Opal's plan in its tracks, didn't mean she hadn't succeeded in ruining his life after all.

She didn't mention that just because Atlantis Complex _was_ curable did not mean that it was a promise. That the treatment was pretty much electroshock therapy and that the suicide rate was terrifyingly high. That it had never even _existed_ in a human before, so who the hell knew if just because they could snuff out Hecate and Orion in a fairy didn't mean they'd be able to get rid of them in him.

She didn't mention that none of this even _mattered at all,_ and even if they cured his Atlantis, even if they wiped out the seizures and fever and illness from Opal's magical brainwash, even if he came out of this the healthiest that he'd ever been in his life-

It wouldn't matter at all.

The shared hurt between them all of the events of this past week could not just be wiped away. She'd nearly died, twice, each time because of someone wearing her best friend's face. Butler was not inconsolable, because Butler was not the type to become such a thing while his charge was in trouble, but he was as close to a wreck as she had ever seen him and was going to blame himself for this for the rest of his life. Possible relations between the People and humans had been set back an entire generation; now whenever any liberal wing pushed for giving a singe human a chance, they would all be reminded of the planetary near catastrophe that they had gotten for associating with Artemis Fowl.

They were all going to always remember the days they'd spent trapped in a time stop, picking through the refuge of madness in Artemis' destroyed room to find themselves placed, piece by piece, in a puzzle where their friend, who they'd all trusted with their lives, had meant to trap and abandon them because he hadn't trusted them.

She didn't mention any of those things, because her friend didn't need her to.

He wasn't stupid.

He already knew them all for himself.

The problem was, he blamed himself for it.

"...Holly?"

She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head through a single ragged breath. No. She knew that tone of voice, she knew what he was about to say, and she just couldn't. "Don't-"

"I'm so sorry. What Hecate did- I couldn't stop him. I-"

"I said _don't,_ Mud Boy. Not today." She glared at his side, just barely resisting the urge to put a hand on his face and make him look at her, to get over this skittish avoidance and actually _look her_ in the eye and see the truth for himself. "What Hecate did. Not you."

"He's a part of me! He _came from_ me, clearly, everything he did to you must have been buried in my head, I-"

"And I don't care. You get that, Artemis? I know it wasn't you, first and foremost because you can't throw a punch to save your life, and even if you learn how, I know you'd never do any of the things that he did. Not anymore."

He scoffed quietly, head jerked away and arms pulled in around himself as if trying to pull into a protective cocoon. It was clear he did not believe her, pale face ingrained in an almost childlike sulk, and worse than that, that he wasn't even going to try to argue. His mind was made up, and it wasn't an argument worth having because in his head, it didn't even matter what she thought.

Hot anger caught in her chest so severely that if he hadn't been sitting there beaten all to hell and already doubting everything there was to their friendship, she really would've hit him.

If she hadn't promised Butler to bring him back in one piece, she might have, anyway.

Somewhere not already hurt. And that wasn't sensitive. And... really gently. That, too.

Then, _ah, hell. When did I get such a soft spot for a Mud Person?_

"...All the same," Artemis murmured, then coughed heavily, the sound muffled into his knee but the violent shudder through his back evident all the same. "I am still truly very sorry, and will understand if you don't accept my apology. I understand the current circumstances might make that hard to believe, but I am. None of my plans ever accounted for me not being in complete and total control of my actions." He hesitated, an errant shiver trembling through his shoulders, then coughed again, this one wetter and harsher than before. "I think he's been... corralled, for now. But I can't promise that it's permanent."

"...corralled?'

"Yes," Artemis answered, nodding. This time, he did make an effort to look at her, but seemed just so intensely uncomfortably that she wasn't even surprised, when he could bear it for no more than a second and then, had already turned away again. "Orion and I knew we had to stop him, and- I'm not quite sure _what_ it is we did. But it... fractured him. When we woke up again, he wasn't there." He paused again, not quite shivering, but still so unnaturally tense it was as if he he was made of glass. "Locking a part of yourself away does not tend to result in that part dying off, however. I'm sure he will be back."

She hated to admit it, but she agreed with him.

This was not going to be the last that she saw of the part of her best friend, that believed he'd be better off with her gone.

"What was it that happened when you woke up, anyway?" Shivering herself, she moved back over the rough, muddy ground, crawling so as to draw closer to his side. She was warmer than he was, for a multitude of reasons, but right now all that mattered was getting the fact through his stupidly big brain that she- that none of them- were going anywhere, and since he wasn't proving receptive to words, maybe physical contact would manage better. "You were awake, but you weren't- here. Like there are all those... _yous,_ in your head, but... none of them was on the outside."

Artemis laughed a little, but it came out hollow, again; hollow just like the look in his eyes. "Hecate wasn't there, like I said. Just me and Orion, whom you have not met, and... whom I dearly hope you do not. He badly wanted to meet you, but I think he was worried about me, and moreover, was worried that if he came out, he'd upset you. He knew he wasn't the version of me you wanted to see." He paused for a moment longer, brow creasing as he fished for words. Artemis could be very particular about his words, yes, but by the look on his face, Holly knew that he wasn't trying to make what followed more exact or accurate.

He only wanted to soften them, instead. Make them more palatable, bearable, for her to hear.

She rolled her eyes, and pushed closer.

"I was choosing not to come out," he said at last. "The inside of my own head was much simpler, and much safer, than having to navigate the real world. After-" His voice wavered and he coughed again, but this time it was clearly not because of illness. "After all that Hecate's done- after all that _I've_ done- I... I couldn't imagine you'd even want to speak to me. I'd thought you'd- _ow!"_

Not at all satisfied, but grinning all the same, Holly lowered her fist away from the side of his arm. She shook her fingers out and flexed her hands, an obvious warning that she was more than ready to hit him a second time, and met his shocked gaze with a grin that was all broken glass and a serrated edge. "You're not doing that again."

"Holly, I-"

"You don't get to apologize for hurting me- something _you_ didn't even do- and then go on to say something stupid like that. You D'Arviting moron, do you have any idea what it felt like to look at you and see you staring like that, like you were _dead?_ Artemis-" Glowering, Holly gripping at his hand as he tried to pull away, because he had spent too many weeks running away for it to be allowed any more- or _ever_ again. "No, _listen to me,_ this time! Okay? If you're _actually_ sorry for what your actions have done to us, if you're _actually_ wanting to make anything better instead of just empty words, then you won't do that ever again. If you only want to stew in guilt and self-loathing and torment yourself over how much you're convinced we all hate you, then sure. Hide back in your head, for all I care. Hole yourself up in there and leave us talking to Orion and Hecate for the rest of time. But if everything you said to me just now is the real truth, if you are _actually_ sorry, and _really_ want to help fix things, you're _never_ going to leave any of us talking to an empty shell again."

And then, suddenly, she found herself upset without even knowing why. How _dare he?_ Safer inside his own head? After all that they'd _all_ gone through to chase him down, that they'd been scared out of their minds not understanding how or _why,_ and his response to that was just to run away _again_? She'd had to drag him out with magic and now she found out it wasn't because there'd been something wrong with him, but he'd made the _choice_ to stay locked up in his own head?!

After _everything,_ that was what he'd decided to do?!

It felt like she couldn't breathe. Like something unbearably heavy was crushing down over her chest and all the shock and horror and fear since the instant Artemis had thrown himself into the past had caught up with her all at once, and now it was suddenly more than she could take. This stupid Mud Boy- how _could he-_ and of course it wasn't his fault, of course it was Opal's, they just had to keep remembering that, that it was _Opal_ who had forced his hand and nothing Artemis would've ever believed if he hadn't had a voice in his head screaming it... none of this was _actually_ her best friend. It _couldn't_ be, because Artemis wasn't _this._ He wasn't supposed to be this insecure, shivering, blood and bruised-stain _thing_ by her side, vulnerable and without a trace of smugness or arrogance in sight no matter _what_ Opal had done in his head. That wasn't Artemis; Artemis was- was-

Was sitting next to her, as shellshocked and quiet as a traumatized child, and staring with shadowed eyes down to his upturned, newly scarred wrist.

Realization washed over her like a bucket of ice, and in the same breath, nauseated anger catapulted downwards into a hard knot of guilt.

That was why she was angry.

That D'Arviting scar, and what he'd made her see upon walking into that room.

Finding her best friend curled limply up on his side, white and wheezing, and bleeding to death from a wound that was self-inflicted.

And, because Artemis really was so perceptive it wasn't even fair, he'd realized it before she had.

Seeming to sense her eyes on him again, the human glanced back to her direction with a weak and shallow smile. He rolled his scarred wrist up for a heartbeat, giving the scar to light, then just shook his head in abject disgust and let it fall. "It wasn't me," he promised. "I'm... very sorry. I wish you hadn't had to see that. But it wasn't me, Holly." He turned his hand over several times, examining it under the pale light, then moaned. "Butler is going to have a conniption, isn't he?"

She chuckled past the lump in her throat, and once again had to blink back almost-tears. _As if he wasn't already..._ "You might need to be wearing some Kevlar for when he sees you," she mumbled, then coughed again, trying to clear her throat and failing rather miserably, at that. Magic worked wonderfully on wounds, but not so wonderfully to prevent any scarring, and in the state Artemis was in now, she'd used only the bare amount necessary to close the wound. Even now, there was no hiding it. They could both still see it all, plain as day.

The pale pink, rough mark, hewn across the delicate skin of the inside of his wrist. Over an inch long, and the unmistakable mark of a knife. Even once Artemis had healed enough for it to be safe to try, Holly just had to look at it now to see that no amount of magic was going to erase the scar. It would fade, with time, but that mark was there for life.

Butler was going to understand the instant he'd seen it.

 _Everyone_ was going to understand, whenever they saw it, for the rest of his life.

"It... was Hecate, then?" She ventured her hand closer but something about the sight of it made her stomach lurch. It was ridiculous, because not only was she an LEP officer, she had been the one to stick her hands wrist-deep into that mess of blood that very same day, frantic over her best friend's already cooling corpse, and scream _HEAL_ She had been the one there to make it _right._ And now, she couldn't even touch the damn thing? Holly laughed again, the sound broken and caught in her throat; her eyes burned and she tore them away from the whole dammed horrible sight. It made her sick. "It wasn't you, you said. So, _he's_ the one who did that?"

However, Artemis again shook his head, scar left upturned and shadowed features remained closed off. "No. Hecate, I believe, is my ambition, untethered by a conscience, moral compass, or anything else necessary to form a productive member of society. He was... quite terrified, by the prospect of death. I don't think it's possible for him to _want_ to die, when his existence is ambition. It was Orion."

 _Orion._ She committed that name to memory, swallowing hard around the bitter taste it left in her mouth. Orion and Opal: the two people responsible for nearly killing her best friend. Opal, psychotic megalomaniac malignant waste of space, and- Orion. A name she only knew as that alter she'd now heard both Artemis and Hecate mention, and still had yet to meet for herself. "I think," she muttered under her breath, "I've got a few words for this _Orion_ after all."

"God, no. Please, Holly- by whatever shreds of pride I have left, whatever scraps of sanity- spare us both that indignity. _Please."_ He buried his face in his hand and tugged through his matted hair, trembling fingers trying to soothe down the bloodied knots and upright tangles for a ragged breath- and there, just in that moment, she saw his fingers start to tap nervously in a pattern of five. "I won't defend what he did, but... Orion's entire existence is hyper-focused on you. And other, equally embarrassing delusions that he is a noble knight- but you are his entire world, and, he had just found out that you were dead. We had all just found out that you were... dead, Holly."

Once again, his eyes stayed shut, and his face peculiarity, almost frighteningly, calm.

She knew him too well, though.

She heard the lightest flicker of anguish in his voice, and heard, deeper than that, all that it meant.

It was the same anguish that had caught in his quavering words when he'd called her to beg for her help, saying that his mother was sick- and then, days later, when he'd started at her with broken eyes and told her _I lied._

It was the same guilt and soul-deep terror that had stabbed straight through when he'd called her before that, his eyes red and tears underneath his voice because Butler was dead.

It was the same broken eyes that had looked to her when he had been her careless kidnapper, a schemer, and a smug piece of shit, and he'd offered her several tons of gold that he'd just risked everything to get, if only she would just heal his mother.

"You don't have to worry," he croaked into his hands. "I'm not suicidal. I wouldn't have been even if it... y-you weren't... if _it_ was true." Five unsteady taps of his index finger against his cheek, nail scraping and the blood, congealing slowly like slick mud. "As I said, I am so sorry you had to see that- to deal with all of this, Holly. I'm so sorry... for what Hecate did, for what Orion did, for what _I_ did- I... I never meant for any of this- but what does that matter? None of my plans ever succeed, not the way they're meant to, and you always get hurt for it. _Everyone_ gets hurt for it, and it's my fault... you're sick of me for it, you're all sick of me, and I deserve-"

By this point, Holly had heard quite enough. He was shaking his head and shivering and rambling, now, a muffled rant against his hand that was all too eerily similar to what they'd seen on the v-diaries, and that was all that was needed. She had seen him do that too many times in a flickering hologram, alone in his office to pace and stumble, half-mad, rambling back to a voice in his head, to be able to bear it now when he was right there in person.

For the second time that horrible night, she pushed up to her knees, turned to her bigger friend, and hugged him as tightly as she could.

"-my fault- _Holly,"_ he whined, choking.

" _Artemis,"_ she whined straight back. Somehow, her fingers found his hair, and she buried them there for her other hand to curl into one shredded, mucked sleeve. "You're already forgiven."

"But-" He tried to push her back again but it was with hands that shook and a voice that trembled even worse than that. "But I've done-"

"As shocking as this might seem to you, none of us are actually unaware of what you've done, Arty. I didn't say we'd forgotten." She tightened her hold again, and it took ever fiber of her being to fight the instinct to try and calm the despairing panic with just a hint of magic. "I said you're _forgiven."_

He shook his head desperately again, silently working his mouth in abated attempt after attempt to fight back but never managed so much as a single word. He was as close to beside himself as she'd ever seen him, the fingers clutched into her uniform shuddering in those dammed patterns of five and once again she pushed back just enough to grab him by the shoulders instead, staring into his frantic eyes to _make him_ listen. "Shh. _Shh._ Do you know what Foaly said to me, before I ended up in 1998 and chasing you across half of Europe? The very last thing he said to me?"

"I-" Teeth chattering, back heaving, almost-sobs gasped out to shatter his voice in two. "I don't bloody _know,_ Holly-"

"He told me to stay safe, and _bring you home."_

He spluttered something stupid again, just wordless and nonsensical desperation choked out of as a suffocated gasp. He tried again, and this time, got out nothing.

"That's right," she said back, squeezing even tighter, as tight as she could get the human in her arms. "That's what Folay said. Butler- Butler didn't say anything, because he didn't even have to. I'd already had to promise that I'd get you back in one piece before he'd even let me go in his place at all. Why in Frond's name would either of them do any of that if they didn't care?" She shoved him lightly again, barely more than a gentle little push at his shoulders, but Artemis still managed to look so stunned she might as well have hit him across the face.

Still so guiltstricken, still so _horrified_ with no one but himself, and she would've given anything to make that look go away.

She didn't have _anything._

All they had was this.

So she wrapped her arms back around him, pressing her head again to his shoulder, and went on.

"I know you want to think that this has changed things, that all that's happened has erased all of that, but it hasn't. None of us are okay with it but none of us blame _you,_ you moron." _We just wish you'd asked for help before it was too late._ "You said already that you knew what Atlantis Complex was. You know this is all Atlantis talking- you _know_ it's not rational, Artemis, you-"

"I tried to _kill you,_ Holly! Atlantis didn't make that up; _you almost died!"_ Artemis shoved backwards, wild-eyed and panting like a cornered bull. He looked like he would've been up and pacing if his leg hadn't been torn to shreds in the time tunnel; as it was the enforced helplessness and vulnerability was only making it worse, the frenetic tapping in his hands speeding it up and his face twisting through stomach-churning horror. "Atlantis may have given Hecate and Orion individuality but it did not _create_ them! They are both parts of me, shaved off and isolated, but _from me,_ Holly! Orion is this- this bloody dammed fool, I do not care what he chatters about in my head, but everything that Hecate is is also in me, and don't try and lie to me to pretend that he's not!"

He shook her once, bloodied hands dragging, scraping against her, panting again, desperate and almost in tears for one of the first times in his life. He looked like he was well on his way to stressing himself into a stroke and worse than that, wouldn't even _mind_ it, because it'd mean the end to all of this, but when Artemis Fowl got on a roll the only way to stop him was a brick wall so he panted and sobbed on through a rant intended only to incriminate himself.

"I've kidnapped you once, Holly. I've lied to you, and I've kidnapped you, and I've _hurt you,_ all for the sake of just some- some nonsensical, disgusting _plan!"_ One hand threw up in desperation to tug back at his hair while the other stayed clenched and trembling on her shoulder, grasping convulsively with each choke of a gasp, scrabbling for the contact even as he flinched away like she'd scalded him. "Do you think I wouldn't have done what he did, if it wasn't necessary for some demented scheme?! I've already proven I have no limit; I was no different than him back then, and I'm hardly different _now-_ I could've killed you all and yet I'm still here, I'm still trying-"

"Artemis Fowl, shut up, or I will do it for you."

"-I'm s-still- Holly, I-"

 _"Shh,"_ she snapped, and with nothing more than that, clapped a hand over his still stuttering mouth. He spluttered a second time, making an odd sort of _urk_ sound into her hand that was almost funny, that _would've_ been funny, if he wasn't so upset. He was, still, _so upset._ His bicolored eyes were huge and distraught, blood streaming down the fairy one and the other rimmed in red, his face pale and torn and she just wanted to smooth the misery away with her hands alone and make him understand. "If anyone has a right to talk about the kidnapping besides you, it's me. Can we at least agree on that?"

Silence. Two quick, shocked, fluttering blinks. An even more stunned, limp nod.

Nodding back, Holly lowered her hand, nudging the rough grip on her shoulders off to hold his face again, leaving him unable to squirm or back away. "You kidnapped me. I imagine Hecate would have, too. And what happened after that, Mud Boy? I can guess what Hecate would've done with all that gold, but what did _you_ do?"

"What-" He blinked almost dumbly, obviously utterly lost as a child. "What are you even trying to... nothing _defensible,_ Holly, my _god!"_

It took her a moment to realize he honestly didn't even _know._ Had just so firmly categorized everything about that day into bad- terrible person- never accept- never do again- that he'd not allowed himself to remember what about it that was good.

Her heart sank.

Stupid, ridiculous, _infuriating_ Mud Boy.

"You regretted it so much," she forged on, gentler, now, and squeezed both her hands on his shoulders to keep his gaze focused on her, stuck, right there, "that you didn't use a single cent of that money, money that you _earned,_ by the way, and you've apologized for it so much I'm sick of _hearing_ it, Artemis. Even back then, you tried to be what Hecate is, and you couldn't do it. He might be a part of you, and Orion might be, too, but add them up and they I still don't get _you._ I told you, Mud Boy, _you're_ forgiven. That doesn't include anything Hecate did and it doesn't have to, because you're not the same people... even if he _does_ happen to live in your head."

He blinked several times again, wordless still and utterly empty with a vacant, dazed sort of shock. There was a cold sweat broken out over his forehead and his hand was doing that tapping again, five quick twitches over and over, but Artemis, for once, was silent. He just stared back at her in quiet speechlessness, kept his mouth shut, and thought.

A slow, dark line of blood trickled down past his hairline. It met her hand against his cheek, cold and slick, and with a faint shudder, Holly wiped it away, then pulled her hands back to her own lap.

For a few more seconds, there was nothing.

Then, he tilted his head back, and smiled. "Gestalt Principle," he murmured. "Very astute, Holly."

"...Ges-who?"

He smirked faintly, and that tiny little twist of his mouth there was perhaps the most lighthearted, _Artemis_ expression that she'd seen from him in months. "Gestalt Principle. A principle of the perceptual system in neurology: the sum of the parts is not equal to the whole. Neither greater or less than, necessarily, but simply an other, wholly independent sum that is not the same as the whole."

This time, it was Holly's turn to blink, dumbly and absolutely blankly.

Miraculously, Artemis laughed, then, actually _laughed._ For a moment Holly thought he'd lost it after all, because he just sat there smiling and shaking his head as if there was something incredibly funny, about all of this- but as usual, he was the only one who got the joke. "It means that no matter how many pieces I'm split into," he explained weakly, voice thin but sure, "adding them all up does not equal _me._ Orion and Hecate are me, certainly. But their actions are not mine." He paused, rolling his hands together in his lap, burns and new scar and all. "I... still deeply apologize for their actions, Holly. And suspect that accepting them as parts of myself is something that I am going to have to do. But you said it yourself- the Gestalt Principle. They are not me."

Holly blinked blankly again.

That... actually had not really helped.

At all.

But, by the look on his face, it seemed to have helped _him,_ and she was just gonna take that as a victory.

_There he is, at last- there's finally an Artemis that I recognize..._

_Now, if only Artemis was a bit less lecture-happy._

"Hecate, the psycho," she said, smiling. "Orion, the weirdo. And Artemis, the nerd."

Once again, it was Artemis' turn to roll his eyes, even managing a half-hearted sort of grin before the lightheartedness was chased away for a shared but calm exhaustion. Holly would've been more concerned, if she couldn't sympathize quite so badly. He was surely just as tired as she was, and at the moment, just about anything beyond just curling up in the grass to close her eyes until a better day was more than she could handle. If, for once in his life, he wanted to take it easy and nap, she wouldn't hold it over his head.

Probably.

But, rather unsurprisingly, her friend did not keel over to curl up onto his side on the ground. Refined as always, simply leaned his face against a knuckle, kneading against his forehead, then unfurled his hand to hide behind it instead. No longer distraught, at least, but now tugging through his hair and rubbed at dirtied smears of blood, a crumbled mess and struggling, somehow, to anchor himself. "I need to get home," he murmured. "I badly must... return home, Holly, at the... first opportunity."

For a moment, Holly didn't quite understand. Not the words themselves, but the oddly stilted phrasing, strangely tense when even a moment ago, he'd at last been calming down. He wasn't upset, really, just... clearly unsettled, and she did not see any reason why for it.

A cold drop of sweat again rolled down the side of her friend's cheek. He fidgeted slightly again in the quiet, and his hand tapped nervously by his side.

Her eyes widened.

_Ten words._

_Oh._

Her own sense of unease and guilt tightened in her throat, and for a few moments, she wasn't even sure what to say.

"Well," she began, finally. In spite of herself, she counted her words, too. Maybe when they were home, maybe when he was being treated, maybe _after,_ she wouldn't have the patience for it. But now still stuck in the past and Artemis looking just one wrong word away from falling apart- now, at least, she could manage. "You will be, soon." _Five._ "We had to stop, to... recharge our pairs of wings." _Ten._ "We will get you back, Artemis, I promise. In..." _Come on, think, Holly..._ "...in no less than five hours."

_Fifteen._

Artemis breathed in shakily again, clearly oblivious to the struggle she'd had counting her own words and only aware of his own desperate word count that he had no choice but to stick to. The inhale came long and shuddering as his hand still twitched, buried against his matted hair. At first that was the only reaction she got at all; just an unsteady, preparatory breath, face still hidden in his hand, shoulders still trembling all the way down and mismatched eyes squeezed shut in the same distress that she'd watched her best friend descend into for months straight.

Then, with a second deep, shaking inhale, he lifted his head, and crawled on trembling hands and knees to the set aside pairs of wings. His left hand was smudged with blood and bruises, and his right, his newly scarred one, was trembling badly, and the whole of him was still shredded almost to pieces, but he still just knelt down next to the first set of wings and neatly pried off the panel. "Yes..." he murmured, almost to himself, "an ingenious design, right... I remember studying this intensely- but after the advancements made in the potential energy of quantum- ah, just a moment, Holly..." He fiddled on for several seconds, brow furrowing as if it were nothing more than a very difficult chess game. He scowled. "Or, perhaps several more minutes..."

Holly rolled her eyes and smirked, but kept silent. Counting words really wasn't that easy and right now, with Artemis calm at last, she just did not want to risk it. And regardless, what was the point in risking anything, at this point, anyway?

Her best friend was still alive, she was still alive, and he trusted her enough to be willing to let her take him home.

She was pretty damn content with that.

It took several minutes into the newly comfortable, almost unbelievably calm silence, for him to speak again.

"I think Hecate was right about just one thing, though." He paused, hands still elbow deep into wires and sparking battery packs, head ducked so his dark hair shadowed his eyes and all she could see off his face was the bruises overlaid on skin as white as the stars overhead. 'I'd be so much more, had I never met you."

She stiffened.

Artemis gave a particularly hard tug, on whatever it was he was working on. There was another firework of sparks, these red-gold and brilliant like little tiny stars, and underneath their sudden glow, she could just barely glimpse a triumphant, proud smile. "And none of that is something that I want to be."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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